Central European Pasts

Old and New in the Intellectual Culture of Habsburg Europe, 1700–1750

Ines Peper, Thomas Wallnig, Ines Peper, Thomas Wallnig

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110649291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Präsentationsvideo (4. Folge der Reihe 'ÖGE18 Update')

Anyone wishing to look beyond the paradigm of Western progress needs to understand how it came into being. In the intellectual culture of the 17 th and 18 th centuries, the competitive comparison of Ancients and Moderns and their respective relations to civilization and barbarism constituted one of the formative discourses. Yet alternative ideas of time and historicity are encountered not only in cultural contexts outside of Europe but also in the largely forgotten professional knowledge of the Old World: Thomism, Peripatetism, moderate forms of criticism, political theory, and legal practice.

This book introduces a broad panorama of such intellectual cultures in Central Europe. It situates theological, historical, and philosophical scholarship in its institutional and epistemological environments: the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the emerging Habsburg Monarchy. In doing so, it identifies struggles over competing pasts – Christian, ethnic, legal – as the core of those domains' intellectual development.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introductions
• The Church
• The Empire
• The Habsburg Monarchy
• Epilogues
• Index of People
• Index of Places