Curating the Enlightenment Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt to they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634?1693), Curating the Enlightenment uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Abandoning the surety of established intellectual practice, this 'experimental century' saw Major and his peers reshaping fragments of knowledge into new perspectives. Across new disciplines, from experimental philosophy to archaeology and museology, they re-examined what knowledge was, who it was for, and how it was to be stored, managed, accessed, judged, and transformed. Although later typecast as Baroque obstacles to be overcome by the Enlightenment, these academics arranged knowledge in dynamic infrastructures that encouraged its further advancement in later generations, including our own. This study examines these seventeenth-century practices as part of a continuous intellectual tradition, and reconceptualises our understanding of the Enlightenment.

Part I. Introduction: 1. The dream of the butterfly; 2. Major's life and setting; Part II. Approaches to Knowledge: 3. The making of a research scholar; 4. The history of learning and research infrastructures; Part III. Reworking Disciplines: 5. Anthropology; 6. Lithology; 7. Archaeology; Part IV. Spaces of Knowledge: 8. Experimental philosophy; 9. Museology; Part V. Conclusion: 10. The light of nature and the uses of knowledge; Bibliography; Index.

Vera Keller is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. She holds particular interests in the emergence of experimental science and the connections between scientific research and capitalism, colonialism, and political economy. Keller is the author of Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725 (2015) and The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (2023).