Burke 2000

Peter Burke. A Social History of Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Print.

Ch 1

• Whatever is known has always seemed systematic, proven, applicable and evident to the knower. Every alien system of knowledge has likewise seemed contradictory, unproven, inapplicable, fanciful or mystical. - Ludwig Fleck
• Historians of the future may well refer to the period around 2000 as the ‘age of information’. Ironically enough, at the same time that knowledge has entered the limelight in this way, its reliability has been questioned by philosophers and others more and more radically, or at least more and more loudly than before.... We should not be too quick to assume that our age is the first to take these questions seriously. The commodification of information is as old as capitalism (discussed in chapter 6). The use by governments of systematically collected information about the population is, quite literally, ancient history (ancient Roman and Chinese history in particular). As for scepticism about claims to knowledge, it goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis.
• One purpose of this book may be described in a single word: ‘defamiliarization’. The hope is to achieve what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky described as ostranenie, a kind of distanciation which makes what was familiar appear strange and what was natural seem arbitrary.
  • cf. also Darnton on needing to be estranged from history (qtd in Brayman Hackel)
• Auguste Comte had already advocated a social history of knowledge, a ‘history without names'
• Febvre in his examination of the so-called ‘problem of unbelief' in the sixteenth century, arguing that atheism was unthinkable at this time.
• The idea of a social explanation of the truth, of the kind put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, still has the power to shock, as the case of Michel Foucault’s discussion of ‘regimes of truth’ in the 1980s demonstrated.
• The early modern period will be defined here as the centuries from Gutenberg to Diderot
  • Therefore EM = print. I still prefer Colie's definition: Petrarch -> Swift
• Print also facilitated the interaction between different knowledges, a recurrent theme in this study. It standardized knowledge by allowing people in different places to read identical texts or examine identical images. It also encouraged scepticism, as chapter 9 will suggest, by allowing the same person to compare and contrast rival and incompatible accounts of the same phenomenon or event.
• Knowledge/info, cooked/raw (this borrowed winkingly from Levi-Strauss):
  • knowledge from information, ‘knowing how’ from ‘knowing that
  • ‘information’ to refer to what is relatively ‘raw’, specific and practical, while ‘knowledge’ denotes what has been ‘cooked’, processed or systematized by thought.
  • Wisdom, on the other hand, is not cumulative but has to be learned more or less painfully by each individual.
• Early modern conceptions of knowledge are obviously central to the social history of knowledge and they will be discussed in more detail below. At this point it may be sufficient to note the awareness of different kinds of knowledge enshrined in the distinction between ars and scientia, for example (closer to ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ than to our ‘art’ and ‘science’), or in the use of terms such as learning’, ‘philosophy’, ‘curiosity’ and their equivalents in different European languages.
• ... history of concepts, Begriffsgeschichte as it is called in German
• [Academic AND practical knowledge] If I wanted to cause a sensation, I would claim at this point that the so-called intellectual revolutions of early modern Europe – the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment – were no more than the surfacing into visibility (and more especially into print), of certain kinds of popular or practical knowledge and their legitimation by some academic establishments.
  • Indeed, it is hard to imagine how the text of this ancient Roman treatise on architecture could have been edited and illustrated, as it was in Renaissance Italy, without collaboration of some kind between experts on classical Latin and experts on building. When the text was edited and translated by a Venetian patrician, Daniele Barbaro, in 1556, it was with the help of the architect Palladio, who had been trained as a mason.
  • Machiavelli caused an uproar by stating in explicit and theoretical form some rules which men of affairs had sometimes discussed in meetings and rulers had often followed in practice. The Prince, a confidential document which Machiavelli had presented to a member of the Medici family in the hope of furthering his career, was published in 1532, a few years after the author’s death.59 Francis Bacon was making a perceptive general point in his Advancement of Learning (1605), though he was a little unfair to his predecessor Machiavelli, when he claimed that "The wisdom touching negotiation or business hath not been hitherto collected into writing."
• Highlighted citations (cross reference with this)
  • Berger and Luckmann (1966); Mendelsohn (1977); Ziman (1978); Luhmann (1990)
  • Bourdieu (1984); cf. Ginzburg (1996, 1997)
  • Burke (1990), 17–19, 27

Ch 2

• [Intellectuals:] Karl Mannheim described them as the social groups in every society ‘whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society’. In a famous phrase, already quoted (5), he called them the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’, an ‘unanchored, relatively classless stratum’.
• [Important:] A common view of modern intellectuals is that they are the descendants of the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, who are the descendants of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, who are either a secular version of the Protestant clergy, or the descendants of the humanists of the Renaissance. Such a view is too ‘present-minded’, in the sense of scanning the past only for people more or less like ourselves. Michel Foucault was not the first person to see present-mindedness and continuity as problematic, but he remains the most radical critic of these common assumptions.
• To avoid confusion, it might be a good idea to follow the lead of Samuel Coleridge and Ernest Gellner and to describe the specialists in knowledge as a ‘clerisy’.
• Marie Le Jars de Gournay, who edited Montaigne’s Essays, studied alchemy and wrote a treatise on the equality of men and women
  • Sounds like an interesting figure!
• ...[in the] twelfth century. It was at that time that a European clerisy became visible in the world outside the monasteries for the first time since late antiquity. This development, like that of the universities, was a result of the increasing division of labour associated with the rise of towns.
• One major consequence of the invention of printing was to widen the career opportunities open to the clerisy. Some of them became scholar-printers, like Aldus Manutius in Venice.
• Paul Bolduan, a pioneer compiler of subject bibliographies.
• The rise in the number of students in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was in part the result of the new function of the university as a training institution for the parish clergy, as well as of the increasing demand by governments for officials with degrees in law. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the supply of students was coming to exceed the demand for their services, and a substantial proportion of graduates were becoming frustrated in their aspirations.
  • In the case of England, it has even been suggested that these ‘alienated intellectuals’ were in part responsible for the English Revolution.
• A small but influential group might be described in the language of our own day as ‘information brokers’, because they put scholars in different places in touch with one another, or as ‘knowledge managers’, because they tried to organize as well as to collect material.
• Leibniz, for example was active as a librarian, another career which was growing in importance in the early modern period. Scholar-librarians included Bartolommeo Platina at the Vatican in the fifteenth century, Hugo Blotius in sixteenth-century Vienna, Gabriel Naudé in seventeenth-century Rome and Paris, Daniel Morhof in seventeenth-century Kiel, Burkhard Struve in eighteenth-century Jena and the historian Ludovico Muratori in eighteenth-century Modena.
  • Librarians of this period have been described as crucial ‘mediators’ in the Republic of Letters. Often scholars themselves, they brought information to the notice of their colleagues and were slower than most of these colleagues to abandon the ideal of universal knowledge
• Highlighted citations:
  • Clarke (1966); Rosa (1994)

Ch 3 (4?)

• The institutional context of knowledge is an essential part of its history.
  • I love how Burke triangulates knowledge: academic and practical, institutional rather than free-floating
• The strength of the opposition to Aquinas’s use of the pagan thinker Aristotle in his discussion of theology shows how mistaken it would be to describe these institutions purely in terms of intellectual consensus.
• No wonder that it is common to describe the medieval Church as having exercised a monopoly of knowledge. All the same, as was noted in chapter 1, we should not forget the plurality of knowledges, in this case the different knowledges of medieval artisans (who had their own training institutions, their workshops and guilds), of knights, of peasants, of midwives, housewives and so on.
• The anecdote about the sinologist and scholar of Islam (arabist?) sharing information in Leiden about synchronism is lovely
  • It also tells us about the importance of location in the history of knowledge. In the first place, the importance of personal encounters, an importance which is not confined to the transfer of technology, though it may be even more important in that domain of knowledge than in others.
• Scholars needed to go to all this trouble to meet because knowledge was not spread evenly over early modern Europe.
• The idea of a geography of truth is as shocking as the idea of its social history (above, 5). Indeed, the idea was already exploited for this purpose by Montaigne, who wrote in his Essais (Book 2, no. 12) about ‘the truth which is bounded by these mountains, which is falsehood in the world on the other side.
• The library increased in importance as well as in size after the invention of printing. Within the university, it became a rival to the lecture-room, at least in some places.
• The enforcement of silence in libraries would have been impossible and may have been unimaginable at this time. Like the bookshop and the coffee-house, the library encouraged the combination of oral with printed communication. No wonder then that the reform of libraries had a place in the Baconian reformation of learning planned in England in the mid-seventeenth century.

Chapter on Categories of Knowledge

• The categories of human thought are never fixed in any one definite form; they are made, unmade and remade incessantly: they change with places and times. Durkheim
• from Durkheim onwards anthropologists have developed a tradition of taking other people’s categories or classifications seriously and of investigating their social contexts.
• Western category systems of the early modern period are so different from our own as to require an anthropological approach, as Michel Foucault realized in the 1960s. We have inherited some of the terminology, words like ‘magic’ or ‘philosophy’, for example, but these terms have changed their meaning as the intellectual system has changed.
• Early modern Europe was itself a period of great interest in taxonomy on the part of scholars such as the Swiss Conrad Gesner in his natural history of animals (1551), and Ulisse Aldrovandi of Bologna.
• Different ideas (dichotomies? Is that Ramian?!) about knowledge:
  • One recurrent distinction was between theoretical and practical knowledge, the knowledge of the philosophers and the knowledge of the empirics,
  • ‘science’ (scientia) and ‘art’ (ars)

   *** A vivid example of the employment of these categories in a practical context comes from the building of Milan cathedral around the year 1400. In the course of its construction a dispute developed between the French architect and the local master masons. A meeting of the masons argued that ‘the science of geometry should not have a place in these matters since science is one thing and art another’. To this argument the architect in charge of the enterprise replied that ‘art without science’ (in other words, practice without theory) ‘is worthless’ (ars sine scientia nihil est)

• • public and ‘private’ knowledge (not so much in the sense of ‘personal’ knowledge as in the sense of information restricted to a particular elite group)

   *** The Reformation was among other things a debate over religious knowledge in which Luther and others argued that it should be shared with the laity.
   *** Over the long term, the rise of the ideal of public knowledge is visible in the early modern period, linked with the rise of the printing-press.

• • legitimate and forbidden knowledge

   *** The extent to which intellectual curiosity was legitimate rather than a ‘vanity’ or a sin was a matter of debate.

• • The distinction between higher and lower knowledge (scientia superior and inferior) made by the Dominican Giovanni Maria Tolosani in the 1540s is a reminder of the importance of hierarchy in the intellectual organization of knowledge in this period.
  • liberal’ and ‘useful’ knowledge

   *** Following a medieval classification which was still in use at this time, craftsmen were viewed by the upper classes as practitioners of the seven ‘mechanical arts’
   *** The assumption of the superiority of liberal to useful knowledge makes a vivid example of the intellectual consequences of the dominance of the old regime by what Veblen called a ‘leisure class’.

• • Specialized knowledge was often contrasted with general or even universal knowledge.

   *** To know everything, or at least to know something about everything, remained an ideal throughout our period, described as ‘general learning’
   *** General knowledge was made necessary by the ‘connection of things, and dependence of notions’, so that ‘one part of learning doth confer light to another.’ [qtd from Isaac Barrow]
   *** The religious writer Richard Baxter already noted with regret the growing fragmentation of knowledge in his Holy Commonwealth (1659). ‘We parcel arts and sciences into fragments, according to the straitness of our capacities, and are not so pansophical as uno intuitu to see the whole.’

• • Quantitative knowledge was distinguished from qualitative knowledge and was taken increasingly seriously.
• Metaphors of knowledge
  • ‘Field’ is a revealing metaphor for knowledge, which goes back a long way in western culture, at least as far as Cicero.
  • Trees of knowledge

   *** Another key metaphor of the sixteenth century, as of the Middle Ages, for imagining the knowledge system was that of a tree and its branches. Besides trees of knowledge such as Ramon Lull’s Arbor Scientiae (figure 5), written c.1300 but reprinted several times in the early modern period, there were trees of logic (the so-called ‘Tree of Porphyry’), trees of consanguinity, trees of grammar, trees of love, trees of battles, and even a tree of Jesuits (on the analogy of the Tree of Jesse, with Ignatius at the root).
   *** The tree image illustrates a central phenomenon in cultural history, the naturalization of the conventional or the presentation of culture as if it were nature, invention as if it were discovery. This means denying that social groups are responsible for classifications, thus supporting cultural reproduction and resisting attempts at innovation.

• • System

   *** a more abstract term was coming into use in the seventeenth century to describe the organization of knowledge. This term (associated with the ancient Stoic philosophers) was ‘system'
   *** Three hundred and fifty years before Foucault, in 1612, Alsted used the metaphor of ‘archaeology’ to describe the analysis of the principles underlying the system of disciplines.

• • Disciplines

   *** the sixteenth century saw a movement of ‘disciplining’ – Disziplinierung, as the Germans say – in schools and universities as well as in churches.
   *** Scientific disciplines in particular have been described as an ‘invention’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
   *** In 1450, the curriculum of the European universities, a network which extended from Coimbra to Cracow, was remarkably uniform, thus allowing students to move with relative ease from one institution to another (a practice known as the peregrinatio academica).
   *** seven ‘liberal arts'
       **** ‘three philosophies’, ethics, metaphysics and what was known as ‘natural philosophy’
   *** The ‘higher’ faculties were considered more ‘noble’, another term which reveals the projection of the social hierarchy onto the world of the intellect.
       **** Hierarchy, man. Really striking mode of knowledge organization in the period.

• The first printed bibliography (1545), an impressive scholarly achievement which took years of travel as well as study to compile, was the work of Conrad Gesner, who was as interested in classifying books as he was in classifying animals.
• Philipp Melanchthon published a highly successful textbook of theology known as the Commonplaces (1521), dividing his subject into its specific ‘places’ (loci) or ‘heads’ (capita), or as we would say, using the same metaphors, ‘topics’ and ‘headings’ such as God, creation, faith, hope, charity, sin, grace, sacraments and so on. [cross reference with Blair]
• discipline-specific commonplaces, together with more general ones, were brought together in the Swiss physician Theodor Zwinger’s ambitious encyclopaedia of topics, the Theatre of Human Life (1565) [cross reference with Blair]
• Ramus redrew the frontier between logic and rhetoric. In his own system, binary oppositions presented in tabular form played a major role.
• A more fluid or flexible classification of ‘all the arts and sciences’ was presented by the Frenchman Christofle de Savigny in the form of an oval diagram
• Bacon made the three faculties of the mind – memory, reason and imagination – the basis of his scheme, allocating history to the category ‘memory’, for instance, philosophy to ‘reason’, and poetry to ‘imagination’.42 An examination of the curriculum, the library and the encyclopaedia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests that Bacon’s reclassification was the most successful of the various attempts made at this time.
• In many universities an alternative system to the trivium and the quadrivium invaded or infiltrated the curriculum. This was the system of the studia humanitatis consisting of five subjects: grammar and rhetoric (as in the trivium), plus poetry, history and ethics.
  • It would be interesting to see how poetry and rhetoric are represented in texts of the 'studia humanitatis' curriculum
• Great anecdote about information overload: An Italian writer, Antonfrancesco Doni, was already complaining in 1550 that there were ‘so many books that we do not even have time to read the titles'.
• Bibliographies, a form of reference book which became increasingly common in the period (below, 187) have been described as libraries without walls’ which could travel all over Europe.
• In his Advice on Building up a Library (1627), which devoted its seventh chapter to the question of classification, Naudé declared that a pile of books was no more a library than a crowd of soldiers was an army, and criticized the famous Ambrosiana library in Milan for its lack of subject classification, its books ‘heaped in confusion’ (peslemelez).
• In other words, the contents of the museum, whether natural objects or artifacts, are classified not by place or period but by the substances out of which they were made. Manfredo Settala of Milan adopted the same classification by raw material, thus encouraging the impression that the museum was a microcosm, a universe in miniature.
• the ‘paper museum’ (museo cartaceo) of the Roman virtuoso Cassiano del Pozzo, featuring images of classical antiquity and much more.
  • interesting
• Bacon’s classification seems to have been especially influential. Naudé’s discussion of the formation of a library, for example, adopted a Baconian framework.
• Alphabetical order had been known in the Middle Ages. What was new in the seventeenth century was that this method of ordering knowledge was becoming the primary rather than a subordinate system of classification. Today the system may seem obvious, even ‘natural’, but it appears to have been adopted, originally at least, out of a sense of defeat by the forces of intellectual entropy at a time when new knowledge was coming into the system too fast to be digested or methodized.
• Looking back, it is tempting to describe the first half of the seventeenth century as a brief ‘age of curiosity’. It was the time that the words ‘curious’, curiosus or curieux came to be used much more frequently. The religious criticisms of ‘curiosity’ had at last been virtually banished from the secular sphere, while the secular criticisms of ‘useless’ knowledge were not yet vocal. In the second place, there was a shift in conceptions of knowledge, to borrow the famous phrase of Alexandre Koyré, ‘from the closed world to the infinite universe’, a new vision of knowledge as cumulative. Novelty lost its pejorative associations and became a recommendation, as in the titles of such books as Kepler’s New Astronomy and Galileo’s Discourse Concerning Two New Sciences.
• Independently of the practical reasons for which it was adopted, the use of alphabetical order both reflected and encouraged a shift from a hierarchical and organic view of the world to one which was individualistic and egalitarian. In this respect we might speak of ‘the content of the form’, reinforcing the editors’ ambition to subvert the social hierarchy in some respects at least. For the Encyclopédie was a political as well as an intellectual project.
• Yet more citations:
  • Kelley and Popkin (1991); Daston (1992); Zedeimaier (1992); Kusukawa (1996); Kelley (1997)
  • Feldhay (1995)
  • Rossi (1960), 47, 51–61; Lacker (1979); Tega (1984); Serrai (1988–92), vol. 2, 120–31
  • Bouza (1988); Chartier (1992); Zedelmaier (1992), 112
  • Stegmann (1988); Chartier (1992)

Ch

• Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. Johnson
• The sociology as well as the geography of libraries is also relevant to the history of the acquisition of knowledge.
• Periodicals deserve a special mention because they made learning easier. As the Italian philosophe Cesare Beccaria once observed – in the pages of the journal II Caffé – periodicals spread knowledge more widely than books, just as books spread knowledge more widely than manuscripts.
• The history of ways of listening and even of ways of viewing has not been studied in any depth, but the history of reading has attracted a good deal of attention in the last couple of decades, the rise of what is known as ‘extensive reading’, in other words browsing, skimming or consulting. [cf. Blair on consultation reading]
• extensive reading was not a new discovery. In ancient Rome the philosopher Seneca, in his second letter to Lucilius, was already advising his pupil not to browse in books, which he compared to toying with one’s food. Francis Bacon developed the same common comparison between reading and eating in his essay ‘Of Studies’, when he distinguished three ways of using books: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
• Centuries before Marcel Proust and ‘his contemporary the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the power of associations and the importance of location for the act of remembering was clearly recognized. It was perhaps for this reason that Sir Robert Cotton described the major sections of his library by the names of Roman emperors whose busts were placed on the book-cases.
• It might reasonably be argued that from the reader’s point of view, there is no such thing as a reference book, since any book, even a novel, can be consulted, and any book, even the encyclopaedia, can be read.
• Changes in the physical format of books in the early modern period make it increasingly clear that many of them were designed for some uses other than close or intensive reading. Indexes and lists of contents became increasingly frequent. The term ‘table of contents’ was often to be taken literally, since the list of chapters might be replaced or supplemented by a synopsis in the form of bracketed tables of the kind discussed in chapter 5 (above, 97), tables which made it possible for a reader to take in the structure of the treatise virtually at a glance. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, uses this technique to display the definition, species, causes and symptoms of melancholy.
• As d’Alembert pointed out in his introduction to the Encyclopédia (above, 115), there are essentially two ways of arranging information in encyclopaedias (in the West at least). In the first place, what he called the ‘encyclopaedic principle’, in other words thematic organization, the traditional tree of knowledge. In the second place, what he called the ‘dictionary principle’, in other words alphabetical order of topics.
• In the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson provided his readers with the earliest known index to a work of fiction.
• The conflict between the two systems makes a good illustration of the problems raised by presenting the history of knowledge as a story of progress. The change from the thematic system to the alphabetical system is no simple shift from less to more efficiency. It may reflect a change in world-views (above, 115), a loss of faith in the correspondence between the world and the word. It also corresponds to a change in modes of reading.
• Harold Innis once complained how ‘encyclopaedias may tear knowledge apart and pigeonhole it in alphabetical boxes’. They both express and encourage the modern fragmentation of knowledge.
• However, some of the cross-references in the Encyclopédie surely achieved their subversive aims without being followed up; it was sufficient for an article on the Eucharist to end with the recommendation, ‘see cannibals'.