Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Towards a History of Ignorance -- 1 Law and the Uncertainty of Value in Late Medieval Marseille and Lucca / Daniel Lord Smail -- 2 Nescience and the Conscience of Judges. An Example of Religion's Influence on Legal Procedure / Mathias Schmoeckel -- 3 Speaking Nothing to Power in Early Modern Germany: Making Sense of Peasant Silence in the Ius Commune / Govind P. Sreenivasan -- 4 Coping with Unknown Risks in Renaissance Florence: Insurers, Friars and Abacus Teachers / Giovanni Ceccarelli -- 5 (Non-)Knowledge, Political Economy and Trade Policy in Seventeenth-Century France: The Problem of Trade Balances / Moritz Isenmann -- 6 Ignorance in Europe's State Financial Culture (Eighteenth Century) / Marie-Laure Legay -- 7 Voluptas Carnis. Allegory and Non-Knowledge in Pieter Aertsen's Still-Life Paintings / John T. Hamilton -- 8 Humanist Styles of Reading in the Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton / Taylor Cowdery -- 9 Coexistence and Ignorance: What Europeans in the Levant did not Read (ca. 1620-1750) -- 10 Ignorance about the Traveler: Documenting Safe Conduct in the European Middle Ages / Adam J. Kosto -- 11 International Crises as Experience of Non-Knowledge: European Powers and the 'Affairs of Provence' (1589-1598) / Fabrice Micallef -- 12 Dealing with Hurricanes and Mississippi Floods in Early French New Orleans. Environmental (Non-) Knowledge in a Colonial Context / Eleonora Rohland -- 13 'Unknown Sciences' and Unknown Superiors. The Problem of Non-Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Secret Societies / Andrew McKenzie-McHarg -- 14 Specifying Ignorance in Eighteenth-Century Cartography, a Powerful Way to Promote the Geographer's Work: The Example of Jean-Baptiste d'Anville / Lucile Haguet -- 15 Semantics of the Void: Empty Spaces in Eighteenth-Century German Historiography. A First Sketch of a Semiotic Theory / Lucian Hölscher -- 16 Non-Knowledge and Decision Making: The Challenge for the Historian / William O'Reilly -- Index nominum -- Index rerum.
Summary
Thoroughly researched contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris on coping with ignorance in late medieval and early modern administrative practices, science, literature and the arts, are tightly connected by a new theoretical framework on how to historicize ignorance.--
