Abstract

Response: Knowledge Lost: A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History (2022)-translated from Martin Mulsow's Prekäres Wissen (2012)– explores the precarious nature of radical intellectual activity in the early modern German context in the decades around 1700. Mulsow examines the vulnerability of thinkers whose ideas were deemed dangerous by state or church authorities, given the risks of censorship, social ostracism, and the loss of ideas that could not be safely shared. Mulsow discusses various signs of precarity including the use of manuscript instead of print, the marginal social status of most radical thinkers, and the use of textual strategies to create plausible deniability. This book models new questions to pose and new clues to examine to write an alternative intellectual history focused on knowledge lost, hidden, or distorted.