E-grāmata: Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century

In late seventeenth-century Europe, scholars crafted the research university as a haven for critical inquiry in defiance of political and economic pressures. Across new fields, from experimental science to archaeology and museology, academics abandoned established intellectual practices and curated the concept of the research discipline itself.

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.