Part I - Introduction

1 The Dream of the Butterfly

In the beautiful opening passage of his 1677 Erring Genius, Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), the first chair of medicine at the new University of Kiel, expatiated on his irrepressible hunger for knowledge.¹ Ambitiously, his mind wished to fly unbounded through all parts of the world and up to the highest vaults of heaven. He wanted to be like a lark, a little, trilling bird. While he hung suspended in the sky on beating wings, his mind’s eye would feed upon the delicious scene of verdant fields below. From there, he would be borne aloft, in a sort of ecstasy, further beyond into those vast spaces past the limits of the world. In the infinite reaches of space, he would direct his overly curious sight to heavenly storehouses of absolute certainty. He would survey the library of the memory of God, founded in the house of eternity, and he would consult the authoritative records of nature and time, written by the hand of experience in the court of truth.

Alas, all this was a vain and impossible ambition. It represented a beautiful dream of knowledge upon which the entire structure of the university and its disciplines had been based. The liberal arts and sciences promised an escape from a limited, distorted human viewpoint and a pathway up to universal, divine truth. Major confessed that he too desired this, but it was mere fantasy. Waking himself from this dream, he turned regretfully to the current state of knowledge. Rather than a heavenly glory of boundless knowledge and universal truth, its landscape was littered with false promises, failed attempts, and wayward human passions. Most wretched were the physical sciences. Those pursuing natural knowledge were promised a logical path to truth through deduction from axioms. Lies! Yet even those who had already seen through this mirage still had no obvious alternative path forward. They pursued experimentation, seeking to move bit by bit from individual observations to broader statements. Viewed from a global vantage point, this too seemed unattainable. How could it ever be possible to collect and study so many experiments by so many people in so many places over the years, even just in the physical sciences alone? How much more unachievable would it be to then coordinate all polymathic forms of knowledge, purify them from fables, and arrange them in ways that made knowledge advance?

This thought gave rise to another ambition in Major’s mind (Figure 1.1). He now wished to fly not on the wings of a lark up into heaven but on those of a butterfly or a bee throughout the world, buzzing about here and there and collecting whatever had been perceived or noted by all peoples, Christian or not, learned or not, on all topics, from the most sublime to the most menial, from the time of Adam to the present. Through this, it would be possible to investigate what this or that thing, author, observation, or phenomenon had contributed to the advancement of the sciences everywhere and throughout all of human history. He hungered for this complete knowledge of facts because if even one observable point was missing, he felt that it would be impossible to form any hypothesis. He would always fear that a contrary instance lurked somewhere out there unbeknownst to him.²

Figure 1.1 The erring genius in flight.

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK. http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0001A18800000000.

The butterfly of Major’s mind fluttered at the edge of a deep chasm in the intellectual landscape, he wrote. Behind it stretched the alluring pastures of far easier approaches to knowledge. These were the standard academic approaches that lulled the mind with promises of certainty and method. Scholars of Major’s generation resisted such temptations. They perceived that such visions of truth were mere phantasms, nothing but the flickering figments of the human imagination. Yet the dream of the butterfly, even if it never soared with the lark up to the highest reaches of heavenly certainty and never dove down to slumber in those soft, verdant fields, was still a fantasy.

This dream of the butterfly represents the state of the mind in the “experimental century,” Major’s term for his era. It longed for truth but was repulsed by the received methods for finding it. It desired certainty while knowing it to be impossible. It was all too aware of the immensity of its task and its own frailties. It acknowledged that perfection would always remain out of reach. Nevertheless, it flapped about, collecting as much knowledge as possible from around the world and throughout time.

This book seeks to recover how early modern academics, fully aware of their limits, braved the looming gulf of the unknown. They abandoned the surety of intellectual practices they had learned in their youth. They rejected the traditional meaning of the discipline as authoritative knowledge passed from master to disciple. They engineered new ways to keep knowledge experimental, dynamic, and changing over time. They accepted that ongoing investigation would likely one day overturn their theories. They helped establish what we now call the research disciplines.

These ambitions for knowledge were immense. The emergence of research disciplines requires nothing less than the reconceptualizing the place of the human in the cosmos. This is because a new model of the disciplines as continually changing fields of knowledge first had to replace the idea of a cosmic chain of being securing everything in place. Humans sought to climb up the chain, escaping their mortal, imperfect condition through the quest for a divine and universal orb of wisdom. Instead of these nested and hierarchical spheres of knowledge, Major identified a new way to conceptualize order in all things, including knowledge and nature. He called it taxis, based on the dynamic orderings of a battlefield. Rather than spheres of knowledge, taxis suggested a new shape for knowledge as an array or plane. These arrays could be found in all things, from contingent and continually shifting invisible corpuscles of matter to fields of study. From a sphere of ranked disciplines, the encyclopedia of knowledge could reconfigured as an open-ended field where units of knowledge could shimmer continually into new formations.

Other scholars have dated the unchaining of the human from a cosmic ordering and the self-reflexive consideration of the human to the Enlightenment, appearing first as a glimmer in the eye of Leibniz and finally reaching fruition with Kant.³ Exploring this much earlier restructuring of knowledge from an inescapable chain to an arbitrary field can reconfigure our conceptualization of how the period of the Enlightenment relates to the knowledge changes that preceded it. The ways that Major and his contemporaries framed human universality can also help resituate his period in relation to later views of human nature. Notably, the dream of the butterfly did not assume that European knowledge set a universal standard for all humankind. All humans desired knowledge. The dream was to gather knowledge everywhere and throughout time because global epistemologies could all contribute to the advancement of knowledge. The goal of this great ingathering was the reformation of European provincialism, bias, and mere convention in learning.

For his contemporaries, Major’s views on the universal desire for knowledge would recall the opening pronouncement of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “all humans desire by nature to know,” which Major recast as the universal desire for new knowledge.⁴ Over centuries, this statement had been understood in various ways, and it was not always clear whether it really applied to all humans.⁵ Major clarified that it did.

Yet, although universal human passion for knowledge made it advance, it could also make knowledge move in dangerous and partisan directions. In an untraditional move, Major cast the desire for knowledge as a form of concupiscence, a material lust widely identified with original sin. Augustine, for example, had linked sinful curiosity, “a lust for experimenting and knowing,” to the original “concupiscence of the eyes” of Adam and Eve that compelled them to seek forbidden knowledge.⁶ In early modernity, curiosity had largely been recuperated as a positive intellectual habit.⁷ While Major’s contemporaries worked to redeem curiosity from its association with original sin, Major kept original sin front and center, situating it as the origin of all the disciplines.⁸ Knowledge was the product of an unstoppable concupiscence, framed in the flawed, material brains of all fallen humans. By centering the eternally unsatisfied human, Major showcased both the power of passion and warned of its dangers.

In framing a desire for knowledge as concupiscence, Major reacted to two rival approaches to knowledge. One was an academic approach claiming that theoretical knowledge could salvage knowledge from human desires. Major denied this. However, he also opposed the main alternative to that view: an extramural approach to knowledge that intertwined knowledge and use closely together. Whereas many current accounts of early modern intellectual change attribute great agency to the pursuit of useful knowledge, Major’s setting in war-torn Schleswig-Holstein showcased how making knowledge useful often meant weaponizing it for some people to use against others. Regional courtly forms of learning had intertwined knowledge with territorial ambition and violence, dragging entangled knowledge and power into conflict. Major and his scholarly colleagues were often thrown on their own devices as political powers battled and tottered. The volatile situation made it impossible for them to cling to any one patron or side. They developed strategies for knowledge that tried to maintain impartiality concerning regional conflict and that appealed to wider conceptions of the public and the world.

The pursuit of power had energized the advancement of knowledge, but in very targeted directions. Major turned to the military concept of taxis in order to marshal knowledge in a counteroffensive. Through taxis, Major sought to maintain the dynamism of advancement while arraying learning in a way that counteracted biases. Amid the din of war, he worked to create a nonpartisan space where students and faculty from every political background could pursue their universal human desire for discovery.

Major saw himself and his peers as perched on the cusp of radical change, in a period he named the “experimental century.” He used this phrase constantly, as did some of his contemporaries.⁹ This phrase may have been inspired by the time frame that Bacon set for the advancement of learning: one entire century or age for testing and many for perfecting.¹⁰ As the defendant of a 1690 dissertation at Strasbourg noted, “I do not deny that in our truly Experimental century, much light has been brought to natural philosophical inquiry, whether through many observations and phenomena through which natural history … has been expanded, or through innumerable experiments … to which today’s natural philosophy owes a great part of its brilliance.”¹¹ Kiel University professor Georg Pasch wrote a history of inventions that innovatively centered on contemporary inventions; “Of any age that has been in the past or will be in the future, the current time has been most prolific in experiments,” he claimed.¹² Kiel professor Daniel Georg Morhof opined, in a public oration at the university, that “in a short space of time we have seen more growth in these [experimental] studies, than in all the centuries past.”¹³ As Leibniz wrote in a letter to Morhof, experiments were proliferating at an amazing rate in their day in contrast to former ages (yet not as speedily as they might).¹⁴

Major believed that desire for knowledge especially inflamed his own generation. He worried that the “ardor of the Experimental Century” might injure knowledge.¹⁵ He also found it difficult to satisfy the “curious and increasingly judgmental condition of the Experimental Century,”¹⁶ which he also referred to as “the sophisticated condition of the current age.”¹⁷ Cognizant of the flood of new knowledge, Major hurried to establish knowledge on new footings; he aimed, among much else, to provide “a science of natural things according to the spirit of today’s Experimental Century.”¹⁸

In doing so, he navigated between the traditional form of the academic discipline, which aimed to preserve knowledge unchanged over time, and a new concept of the discipline, which encouraged change but aimed to counter distortion. To prevent incursions of human desires into knowledge, the traditional academic curriculum distinguished the liberal arts and sciences from the mechanical arts. The former served the mind by elevating reason above matter and theory above practice. The latter, immersed in the material world, satisfied merely corporeal needs. Major rejected a dichotomy of materiality and reason since he acknowledged a material aspect to all forms of cognition. Both seemingly theoretical and seemingly practical forms of knowledge were pursued through the same flawed cognitive processes. Therefore, there was no reason to erect a protective barrier against the study of matter. Major embraced a wide range of subjects and epistemic practices that were drawn from even the most lowly of crafts and rearranged them into the form of a liberal discipline, that is, into the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Defending liberal knowledge meant protecting it from prejudice arising either from philosophical dogma, from human authority, or from the need to make money. This meant carving out a space for curiosity-driven research preserved from immediate pressures to serve any kind of interest.

This effort acknowledged that human knowledge would always remain imperfect. Certainty was always out of reach. Knowledge would always be biased to some extent. Although the universal desire for knowledge was what distinguished humans, it was still a flawed desire. Always lusting for more, as Major’s own mind described Erring Genius, humans would pursue the furthest imaginable ambitions in reckless ways. This powerful impetus of human desire would also push knowledge continually toward biases and prejudices. How would it ever be possible to array a dynamic field of changing knowledge in such a way that the knowledge of all humans could advance together while not being diverted to serve one particular camp or another?

If there were no divinely established, immutable structures serving as protective bastions of knowledge, then knowledge fell to the human alone to manage. Scholars could abandon the field, leaving knowledge with no shelter from service to the many conflicting interests in a war-torn society being reshaped by capitalism. Or they could enter the field, forging new disciplines from highly diverse arenas. Major sought to sharpen intellectual tools that could equip the scholar to cure epistemic wounds and care for the autonomy of reason. These tools were those of curation.

Curation is a process of applying cura or care to something. It is a labor-intensive form of curiosity (which also etymologically stems from cura) that flutters around its object and continually responds to its needs. Curators hovered between new arrays of knowledge and all the forces that hungered to have that knowledge serve them. They positioned objects and fields of study in revocable superstructures. They designed those structures to recognize and thwart prejudice while spurring onward change and aiding the best possible (although always still imperfect) advances in knowledge. Defining norms and ideals for curation and putting them in practice across a wide range of disciplines became Major’s life’s work. The curators themselves, though, were also only human.

1.1 The Antihero in the Experimental Century

Major’s view of himself as a feeble butterfly offers us an antiheroic vision of the Scientific Revolution. A lowering of epistemic ambitions from the obtaining of truth to a much humbler goal of gathering uncertain, revocable knowledge does not fit the intellectual heroics that we now associate with modernity, revolution, and Enlightenment. Our current views do not dispose us to appreciate an epistemically humble approach to knowledge that was self-critical, open to doubt, and designed for future change. It takes a great deal of historical imagination to recover the bravery of the little butterfly perched at the edge of the abyss.

It took boldness to be antiheroic. Conceptualizing oneself as setting out on an untried and ultimately unachievable path into the unknown meant turning, as Major did, against the authority of one’s own professors. Historians have long been skeptical of the polemical charges against “scholastics” launched by members of Major’s generation (and previous ones). They have shown how various forms of Aristotelianism continued to inspire new approaches to knowledge.¹⁹ Yet, many scholars of the period did see themselves as rejecting familiar structures and heading out into the unknown. I pursue the flight of Major (Figure 1.2) across the disciplines as a way to inform a wider story about the emergence of research and the research university. My goal is thus not to offer an intellectual biography of Major in particular but to refocus our views of learning through the lens of an antiheroic individual.

Figure 1.2 Portrait of Johann Daniel Major.

Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, Memoria Majoriana. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-PK. http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0000A4AA00000000.

This focus on an individual goes against the grain of current trends in the history of science and the history of knowledge more broadly. These trends decenter individuals and turn to wider processes such as the circulation of knowledge and the emergence of empiricism.²⁰ In the twentieth century, in an effort to counter models of change based on individual agents, Foucault made seemingly insignificant epistemic infrastructures like catalogs central to his view of the classical episteme. He chose such infrastructures, which were so dear to Major and his contemporaries, precisely because they seemed to him to be so petty and anonymous. This view of intellectual infrastructure, however, begs the question of who made the catalogs and why their efforts might once have been boldly creative.²¹

Foucault’s approach, and the many it has since inspired, offered a much needed corrective to the “great men” model of history that had emerged during the French Revolution and was theorized in the nineteenth century by Thomas Carlyle, Jacob Burckhardt, and others.²² According to this model, great individuals who manifested the totality of an age in an almost spiritual way possessed the power to make history: “Time and the man enter into a great, mysterious covenant.”²³ Narratives concerning the Scientific Revolution were also informed by this model. In such accounts, instead of a political hero like Napoleon, scientific heroes such as Galileo or Newton advanced the frontiers of science.²⁴

Current historical models efficaciously shift the attention of historians of science away from this model of heroic genius and toward much longer developments in which many more groups participate, including women, craftspeople, merchants, enforced and enslaved labor, and the state. Meanwhile, Martin Mulsow has offered a model for the history of knowledge that centers insecure knowledge-makers, the knowledge proletariat, rather than the knowledge bourgeoisie.²⁵ Here, I argue that an attempt to reframe academic disciplines into revocable superstructures represented a conscious attempt to render academic authority insecure and uncertain. The probing of possible pathways between parts of knowledge maintained a hard-won mobility for knowledge, “so that the nascent intellectual boundaries and commitments were not coterminous with the boundaries and identities of groups or practitioners.”²⁶

In order to probe what might be possible, many early modern scholars laid down personal, idiosyncratic “tracks” across varied fields of knowledge. For this reason, biographies and biobibliographies became major tools for mapping the possible overall structures of knowledge and pathways through it.²⁷ This disjuncture between intellectual field and professional career meant the movement of individuals cross-fertilized different fields of inquiry, hybridizing forms of knowledge and generating new ones. Those relationships between many nascent disciplines have been obscured by disciplinary histories that focus upon the origin of a single discipline. The tentative movements of one antiheroic individual across fields can illuminate them. It is my hope that this journey across disciplines will thus not be read as a claim that one individual heroically founded them all. Rather, my intention is to inspire our historical imagination in conceptualizing many similarly errant, fluttering paths across knowledge as the dynamic through which fields of study coalesced in the past and in many ways still do today.

The pace and scale of intellectual reengineering in this period has also been obscured by the enduring view that the most important spurs to knowledge came from outside the academy and that seventeenth-century universities were dull and conservative institutions.²⁸ Agency has been ascribed more to extramural locations, such as the English Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, than to the universities, and especially not to Central European ones. However, Central European academics were fully engaged in the work of learned societies and were often members of them.

Although he was involved in a priority dispute with the Royal Society, Major admired some of its members, such as Robert Boyle, intensely. Major frequently cited Boyle, including Boyle’s passage in the “Pröemial essay” that laid out the need to develop temporary and movable systems for knowledge in place of prematurely systematic and theoretical approaches. Merely probable knowledge could not be systematic. It had to be revocable, shifting and moving dynamically as new evidence emerged and some views came to be rejected in favor of better supported ones. For this reason, the “superstructures” of knowledge erected on the basis of experiments should be “looked upon only as temporary ones; which though they may be preferred before any others, as being the least imperfect, or if you please, the best in their kind that we yet have, yet are they not entirely to be acquiesced in, as absolutely perfect, or uncapable of improvement.”²⁹

Dynamic superstructures that shift on the basis of continually accumulating evidence might be the very definition of research. However, research entailed then and still does today several extremely thorny problems. It required the formation of many new technologies of knowledge that Fellows of the Royal Society were not well positioned to develop. Although Steven Shapin has described the informality and ease that infuses Boyle’s experimental essays as sophisticated literary technologies, the truth is that when it came to inventing scholarly contrivances, extramural gentlemen philosophers did not possess the sharpest tools.³⁰ Academics did, particularly Central European ones who were already engaged in the self-reflexive consideration of media via the genre of the history of learning.

Newly probabilistic philosophical views of knowledge engendered knowledge management problems of a new kind. They called for infrastructures that differed from those that had already been developed to address other knowledge management problems, such as information overload. Central European academics deployed savvy strategies to modify existing knowledge management practices and to invent new ones. For instance, while both Major and Fellows of the Royal Society aimed to make their collections useful for philosophical discovery, the sophistication of Major’s thinking about curation was far in advance of the ordering brough to bear upon the society’s repository.³¹

Before even reaching the shelves of a museum, things had to be broken into manageable pieces that could serve as evidence. As the world does not come prepackaged in units, this work of breaking and arranging knowledge into particulars was of major importance and of often very intransigent practical difficulty. The engineering of revocable superstructures required purposefully loose, dynamic, and rearrangeable ways of moving from one fragmented piece of particular evidence to wider (although still uncertain) statements, without making specious claims to methodical certainty. These included techniques of conjecture and criticism. A third challenge was developing knowledge repositories that could keep all these fragments in play and available to be deployed and redeployed in continually shifting bodies of scholarship. This part of the research infrastructure involved the development of citations, bibliographies, and new practices of note-taking; repositories for material objects with new forms of cabinetry and signage; practices of moving around, rearranging and rejecting units of knowledge as views of them shifted; and new techniques for searching, cross-referencing, and calling up units of knowledge from dynamic and open-ended repositories. Then came the structuring of provisional arrangements of objects and areas of inquiry into disciplines that could also shift over time and whose boundaries were not predetermined by a great chain of being.

Next, scholars had to figure out how to teach knowledge that was changing, and how to relate their teaching to their own efforts to produce new knowledge. Recent scholarship has demonstrated seismic changes taking place at early modern universities as the various branches of a systematic curriculum were disconnected and new specialized chairs arose.³² Canonical texts that had for centuries served as the basis of a predictable rotation of lectures, that had been copied thousands of times in scriptoria, and that had been newly methodized in printed textbooks were no longer the basis of the curriculum.³³ How could faculty keep up with ongoing research, while keeping up their pedagogy as well?

Finally, all these various levels of knowledge infrastructure had to remain dynamic and adaptive to each other. A provisional order would be used to arrange materials that could be used in experimentation to produce evidence. That evidence might then lead to a shift in the overall order, in a never-ending dialogue between parts and the whole. To address and interrelate provisional orders at every level, Major deployed one overarching concept, taxis. Taxis, from the Greek for military arrangements, was a mobile order that arrayed individual units of knowledge strategically across a field. It was this same term that Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778–1841) would use in coining the term taxonomy in 1813.³⁴ Despite its relationship to taxonomy, taxis has been very little commented upon as a means of organizing knowledge.³⁵

Within taxis, each unit could be removed, replaced, or redeployed in a new grouping. There was nothing fixed or ontologically necessary about their placement. Major situated the scholar as the general in the field who deployed units of knowledge in relation to one another and to the general’s strategic aims. The scholar continually scanned the ranks of this array, shifting and repositioning individual units or reconceptualizing entire strategies as changing circumstances demanded, at least in the realm of “human knowledge” or the “encyclopedia of secular science” which Major identified as his province.³⁶ In this realm, disciplines might be temporarily mounted, like a military campaign, only to be repositioned or redeployed differently in the future. As David Marshall Miller and Dana Jalobeanu have written, “Once one adopts disciplinary history as a methodology, the story of the early modern period becomes one about the multiplication and reorganization of intellectual disciplines.”³⁷

This story of a shift from an analogical cosmos to a field of taxis might seem to fit Michel Foucault’s account of an epistemic shift in The Order of Things [Les mots et les choses] from an “age of the theater” to an “age of the catalog,” when taxonomy set the structure not just of natural history but of all forms of knowing. Major attacked arguments from analogy and the semiotic use of collections while working to produce new taxonomic orders. He was especially enthralled by catalogs and made their strategic use a keystone of his entire approach. However, for Foucault there is no room for individual viewpoints within an episteme, which is coterminous with power.³⁸ The episteme is inescapable, particularly in the fixed, disciplinary panoptic gaze of the taxonomic age. However, I argue that taxonomy has never been static, either in Major’s formulation of taxis or in Candolle’s later coinage.

The knowledge that Major engaged through taxis was most definitely informed by politics and the marketplace. The very idea of the “advancement” of learning is imperial in its dynamic. Epistemic and financial speculation entangled in the emergent capitalism that gave rise to conjectural forms of knowledge such as experimental philosophy.³⁹ Yet, he and other academics in war-torn, resource-deprived situations worked to redirect the advancement of learning away from service to power and profit. He attempted to oppose systems of valorization (such as rarity or exoticism) based in the marketplace, rather than upon the excellence of knowledge alone. The most precious thing in the world, he liked to say, was a well-arranged collection. Individual humans curated dynamic articulations of knowledge that shifted with ongoing research, sometimes in resistance to political and economic power.

Major has attracted relatively little attention in recent historiography.⁴⁰ He is mentioned in the history of collecting, the field for which he is currently best known, but assumes a far more marginal place there than he ought.⁴¹ He often does not appear at all in histories of paleontology, geology, anthropology, or archaeology.⁴²

1.2 On the Baroque and the Enlightenment

In part, Major’s reputation has suffered from his involvement across so many domains of knowledge in a manner that could be criticized as an undisciplined Baroque omnivorism. Major has been seen as embodying the qualities of a Baroque scholar such as purposeful disorder and a semiotic, analogical view of the cosmos (which were ideas to which Major was in fact very much opposed).⁴³ The Academy of the Curious about Nature to which he belonged has been seen as exemplifying imprudent polyhistorism, endowed with an “inexhaustible but unfocused energy.”⁴⁴

The “Baroque” is understood frequently as a negative category, in contrast to the Enlightenment.⁴⁵ Some scholars have traced lines of continuity between the Baroque and the Enlightenment.⁴⁶ Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris have sought to recuperate the Baroque and to apply it to major scientific figures of the era. They identify a “Baroque” disjuncture between what figures in the seventeenth century claimed to be accomplishing and what they did, which was often less methodical and more hesitant their initial claims suggest.⁴⁷ However, even understood in this way, the term applies poorly to Major and those academics engaged in similar reforms of knowledge infrastructure. Rather than engaging in the strenuous window dressing that Gal and Chen-Morris term Baroque, Major struck an antiheroic stance, putting his doubt and self-criticism on display and continually pointing out how his interventions were flawed, imperfect, and merely preliminary.

Major’s approach is even more at odds with the ways that art historians coined and have used the term. The use of the term Baroque was established by five conservative intellectuals of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany who saw the category as a means of relating individuals to an all-powerful whole.⁴⁸ It was not unrelated to the model of the heroic individual; Jacob Burckhardt elaborated on both heroic individuals and upon the Baroque, embodied in an artistic genius like Rubens.⁴⁹ Heinrich Wölfflin’s hegemonic sense of style as a Kunstwollen or will to express the spirit of an age does not allow for resistance, subjective agency, or the coexistence of multiple conflicting styles.⁵⁰ Wölfflin’s style can be and has been compared to Foucault’s epistemes.⁵¹ For Wölfflin, the Baroque represented the exertion of an absolute power that obliterated all individualism. Through painterly effects that absorbed individuals in a mass, it aimed to give a united impression of the whole.⁵²

This was a style to which Major was allergic, as it obscured the articulations of taxis, or order, the concept that underlay all of his knowledge interventions. Major frequently engaged in aesthetic criticism. In a lengthy passage in his research notes, he discussed the famous and still extant altar at Kappeln crafted in 1641 by Hans Gudewerth the younger (ca. 1603–71), who also worked on statuary in the Gottorf court gardens. Today, Gudewerth and this altar in particular are seen as exemplars of “Cartilage Baroque,” typified by heavy, droopy shapes reminiscent of flayed skin or cartilage. Major did not find this pleasing at all. Although each part of the altar was “made very curiously” (sehr curieus gemacht), the artist had mixed together so many things, with many irregular curves and interlacing lines, so that the various parts could not be distinguished. He was like a cook who added so many spices to everything that each dish could not be judged according to its own taste. The piece contained too many things, leading to confusion. Having failed to incorporate so many “specimina” “into a large system” (in grosse systemata), the artist showed that he lacked true order (“veram Tacticam”).⁵³ Major launched similar criticisms at Gothic architecture, whose many irregular shapes and spiral lines “confused the eyes so that much is seen at once but little is discerned.”⁵⁴ He had also denigrated the Kunstkammer of his time in much the same way: “You may see many things everywhere, but due to the multitude you hardly discern any.”⁵⁵ Through the concept of taxis, Major worked his whole life against forms of ordering and representation that aimed to overwhelm the viewer and prevent clear perception.

By invoking the problematic category of the Enlightenment in the book’s title, I am signaling to scholars of the eighteenth century that the intellectual interventions of German academics often dismissed as “Baroque” might be integrally related to knowledge dynamics of a later period. By speaking of this period of scholars as “curating the Enlightenment,” I am not attempting to equate all the efforts of the period with what came later but pointing to how infrastructures for future change were put in place intentionally at this time and how several of these infrastructures remained in use. Other polymaths, like Leibniz, have managed to escape identification as Baroque omnivores. Leibniz is often singled out from his contemporaries as a means to begin accounts of a new Enlightenment era.⁵⁶ Viewing the time period from Major’s perspective, we can refocus our vision and see Leibniz and other contemporaries, both well known and obscure, as part of the same time period: the experimental century.

Anthony Grafton, Ann Blair, Martin Mulsow, Markus Krajewski, and many others have studied the material practices of information management as a central concern in the history of knowledge.⁵⁷ William Clark, Chad Wellmon, and Bettina Dietz have explored the Enlightenment in particular less as a philosophical movement and more through changing practices of knowledge management and emergent ideas of research.⁵⁸ Within the history of science, a rich literature currently investigates how the scientific medium was the message. This move was jumpstarted by Bruno Latour’s reception of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s groundbreaking work in the history of the book. Eisenstein argued forcefully for how print shaped science.⁵⁹ The same year that Eisenstein’s book appeared, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar published Laboratory Life, which observed that the main thing that scientists do in the laboratory is produce inscriptions.⁶⁰ Latour then applied Eisenstein’s insights further, extending her arguments in order to think about science as a form of communication and as the circulation of mobile inscriptions.⁶¹ Since then, many works in the history of science have seen the infrastructures, institutions, and audiences of science as important to its history as heroic individuals or moments of discovery.

I draw on this literature but also point to how changing philosophical understandings of nature inspired efforts to transform scholarly practices in ways that applied across all fields. Anthony Grafton and other scholars have demonstrated how humanist and antiquarian approaches previously shaped the empirical study of nature.⁶² Experimental philosophers like Major encouraged a shift away from antiquarian forms of confident empiricism. Highlighting doubt and ignorance, he sought more speculative, tentative, and probabilistic techniques for broaching difficult topics that often could not be empirically observed, whether that be the invisible motions of corpuscles or prehistory. Major considered “experimental philosophy” as an approach that could pertain to any secular subject. As he wrote in Voyage to a New World (See-Farth nach der Neuen Welt ohne Schiff und Segel), one could take any type of human knowledge (Menschliche Welt-weißheit) and weigh it in the same two scales, that is, mature consideration and sufficient observation, and thus mold it into a form that could be called “experimental study or philosophy.”⁶³

Major and his peers engaged a massive problem that remains with us: how can one design a structure for change? His proposed solution was the continual articulation and reorganization of preexisting fragments. The study of taxis shaped the ways that Major recorded those fragments of knowledge within an arrangement and kept those arrangements supple and amenable to movement and change. This book attempts to reassemble the dynamic network of knowledge fragments that Major kept shifting and rearranging throughout his career. In so doing, it shines a light on the creative knowledge management techniques of curators and caretakers that to some extent cleared the desk of later philosophers, allowing them to even imagine a tabula rasa from which to begin.

In the case of Kant, for example, Debora Meijers has pointed to his criticism of “polyhistors” who attempted to “drag around in their heads as materials for the sciences enough books for a hundred camels to carry.” Polyhistors lacked critical judgment, Kant opined, and failed to make their knowledge organized, accessible, and retrievable. The correct approach was to exercise a judicious memory, based on thinking about knowledge as though each idea was a label. Meijers relates this advice to the rearrangement of labeled museums of Kant’s day.⁶⁴ Yet, Major and his peers also criticized the immobile weight of polyhistorism. They had already sought to render the body of knowledge supple and dynamic in part through slimmed-down, museal organization that would transform the curiosity cabinet into what came to be considered the Enlightenment museum.

We might well overlook Major’s pasting and peeling his slips of paper on the mobile signage in his collection as a polyhistor’s obsession with minutiae. It is easy to misunderstand these intellectuals’ constant, focused attention on rearticulating the pathways of knowledge as pedantic fussing. To participants in the experimental century, however, interventions in knowledge management were not epistemic epiphenomena, dithering with little tools and fussing with papers in the shadows of epochal, self-confident seekers of truth. Rather, the continual rearticulation of changing knowledge represented a bold venture into the immensity of the unknown.

On our journey across the disciplines, we will seek to revive the danger and excitement of this flight into the unknown, salvaged from seemingly impenetrable thickets of Latin erudition. We will encounter nascent knowledge fusions that may seem strange to our current gaze. We will spot the same objects of inquiry popping up through the book within different disciplinary arrangements, as Major shifted objects of study around, trying first one interpretive lens and then another. This might appear like a stereotypically bizarre Baroque hodgepodge, especially as Major often joined and hyphenated many disciplines together. Nothing might sound more antiquated to us than lengthy, hyphenated book titles, but there was no better way to signal in the seventeenth century that one wished to do something really innovative to the corpus of knowledge. Such epistemic oddities can be reconsidered as the experimental remixing of knowledge in the aftermath of disciplinary breakdown. This history queries whether the disciplines today are as unified and stable as we imagine them to be, or whether we too are engaging in similar continual rearrangements of our intellectual taxonomies.

1.3 Undisciplining and Redisciplining Knowledge

Major’s probatory view of the disciplines countered the ancient concept of the discipline as a vehicle designed to preserve and pass on knowledge through the tempests of time.⁶⁵ By definition, a discipline was certain and unchanging. As one late antique medical authority wrote, “What is disciplina? Disciplina is immutable knowledge based on reason.” Science and discipline were “more or less synonymous” with the difference that disciplina connoted “various branches of learning.”⁶⁶ Late antique and medieval compilers and methodizers sought to salvage and protect classical knowledge. They set up the concept of the encyclopedia of the disciplines and the deep intellectual structure of universities in the early medieval period. Scholars such as Isidore of Seville (560–636) sought to strip down knowledge in order to pin it upon symbolic or mnemonic structures that illustrated the cohesiveness of the divine cosmos, as in the schematic representation of how the human, the world, and time interacted through the number four: the four seasons, the four elements, the four temperaments, the four qualities, and the four ages of man [sic].⁶⁷ Harmonic and predictable patterns of universe did not convey information so much as make a point concerning the underlying order beneath the surface variety of the world.⁶⁸

As Richard Yeo has written, “encyclopaedias were safeguards against losing again the knowledge that had been regained since the Fall.”⁶⁹ At stake was the salvation of the human soul, as each encyclopedic compiler chose “an appropriate method of organising and setting out the content to reflect divine order and to counteract the sense of worldly life as meaningless chaos.” The result combined “representations of the world with the metaphor of the world as a book, that is, an imperfect image of the created world that can usefully be read and interpreted as a guide to salvation.”⁷⁰

In the early modern period, haunting tales of the fall of Rome and the burning of libraries still undergirded a sense that knowledge was always vulnerable to collapse and that the insecurity of knowledge also entailed civilizational and spiritual collapse. Especially with the rise of the printing press, another fear arose; too much knowledge might also, counterintuitively, spell the loss of knowledge if that knowledge was too much for anyone ever to know and too unwieldy to access.

Ann Blair has explored practices of knowledge management that aimed to grapple with this perceived overflood of knowledge, through practices such as commonplacing, indexing, and the like, including heroic efforts of early seventeenth-century encyclopedists like Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), who still tried (and failed) to encompass all things within a logical structure.⁷¹

The challenge faced by the engineers of research infrastructures in the late seventeenth century went beyond the perceived overflood of knowledge. It was no longer necessarily desirable to attempt to pass down and access all knowledge. As Hole Rößler and others have discussed, the rejection of an isomorphic relationship between human and natural orderings negated the cosmic underpinnings of encyclopedic structures, leading to a crisis of legitimation for pansophic projects. The abandonment of a divinely arranged epistemic order opened up a Pandora’s box of disorganized, disconnected fragments of knowledge that seemed impossible to rope into any unified whole.⁷² It was not just that there was too much knowledge to fit into a system. It was that new concepts of knowledge rejected the legitimacy of systems.

Developing a shape for changing knowledge was and remains a massive problem for research; “Could one have fixed curricula, and complete encyclopedias, if one was continually finding that there ‘are more things in heaven and earth than are found in your philosophy’”?⁷³ How could knowledge be reorganized in order to make it more supple, accessible, and mobile? Curators of knowledge transformed disciplines in a way that remains with us still: there is nothing essential or eternal about any discipline. Humans have merged or disaggregated in the past and will in the future continually merge or disaggregate various aspects of inquiry, hybridizing forms of knowledge into new temporary superstructures that we call disciplines, but which bear little resemblance to the premodern meaning of this term.

A new concept of discipline that encourages change over time, that is, the research discipline, is thus the outcome of a two-step development: first, the breakdown of the premodern concept of the disciplines followed by the reshaping of fields of inquiry in a new way. In my previous book, The Interlopers, I studied the first step.⁷⁴ Appropriating knowledge across social scales and from around the world, extramural epistemic and commercial interlopers developed loose, associative forms of knowledge. They trampled upon an ancient conception of discipline as sticking to one’s last.

Discipline had meant tight mastery for the purposes of transmission of authorized, reliable knowledge over time.⁷⁵ The divisions of disciplines, particularly between the liberal and mechanical arts, aimed to protect knowledge from the distortion of human ambitions and biases. Interlopers saw such distinctions as meaningless and laughable. They sought novel knowledge and expanded powers by ignoring divisions between knowledge domains, mobilizing human interests, and taking on epistemics risks, often in ventures with dire human, societal, and environmental costs. Such loosely hybridized forms of probabilistic, risk-taking, and future-oriented knowledge, I argued, shaped the approaches of gentlemanly English natural philosophers later in the seventeenth century, including fellows of the Royal Society, who flaunted an elite sprezzatura, or lack of care. Constant attention to rearticulating knowledge into new disciplines was really not their style.

Seventeenth-century German scholars admired Bacon and Boyle’s approaches to experimentalism, but they worked to reinsert a human-centric, passionate form of knowledge pursuit back into the form of academic disciplines. Rather than eviscerating human ambition and emotion from scholarship through neo-Stoic restraint, academic experimental philosophers such as Major sought strategies for arranging knowledge in ways that would sustain and expand the human desire for knowledge. They integrated and transformed a previous effort to undiscipline knowledge. This two-step development has shaped the now dynamically complex research disciplines, with a core of undisciplined curiosity and passion energizing the advancement of knowledge, and a battery of research tools attempting (and continually failing) to manage this juggernaut. Research disciplines continue to move forward while being impelled by human desires in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. The friction between our unlimited desire for knowledge and the limits of our abilities will likely never be resolved.

1.4 Structure of This Book

By collapsing social hierarchies linked to epistemic and natural ranks, Major reconsidered the category of the human. All humans were driven by a desire for knowledge, but all humans were flawed. Major himself was also faulty, competitive, and sometimes contradictory. His life is explored in Chapter 2, as well as the larger setting of Schleswig-Holstein and the new University of Kiel. Kiel abounded in intellectual vibrancy despite its small population and the constant warfare it experienced. In many ways, in fact, the desperation its faculty experienced threw them on their own devices and forced them to develop approaches to knowledge independent of political fealty.

Part II outlines approaches to knowledge. Major and his colleagues at Kiel such as Daniel Georg Morhof were at the forefront of the development of the “political-gallant” polymath, a new scholarly model explored in Chapter 3. This learned persona has attracted recent attention as a forebear of the research scholar, and this chapter goes on to analyze the ways polymaths developed various strategies and genres for supporting research, from footnotes and bibliographies to critical comments in journal articles, to new ways of conceptualizing interdisciplinarity. The history of learning (historia literaria), a field of study established by scholars from the nearby Hamburg Gymnasium as well as by Morhof at Kiel, offered critical views of knowledge practices around the world the world and throughout time. It was a platform designed to consider disciplinarity and change over time, with the practical end in mind of designing new approaches and tools for knowledge. Part III, Reworking Disciplines, begins a journey across the disciplines as Major moved between interventions in anthropology, lithology, and archaeology.

The study of the human in anthropology as the source of all disciplines, as discussed in Chapter 5, was fundamental to engineering thoughtful reforms of received intellectual structures. Major was particularly concerned about how trade and mercantile interests might distort knowledge. As discussed in Chapter 5, Major orchestrated an anatomical study of black skin that demonstrated how superficial its pigment was and that criticized slavery on that basis as motivated purely by the profit motive.

Lithology, the subject of Chapter 6, offers a perhaps unexpected bridge between Major’s study of the human in anthropology and his excavations of prehistoric remnants, the subject of Chapter 8. Through the study of highly dubious objects, such as the bones of dragons and giants, Major offered contingent, mechanistic explanations for the growth over time of stony objects that were endowed with mystery, special powers, and semiotic significance. In his eagerness to explain away objects through completely natural means, Major played down the possibility that some might be artifacts. Through his continual self-doubt and querying, as manifested in the constant re-arrangement of objects in his collection, he came to reconsider some such objects from new vantage points. The areas of crossover of anthropology, lithology, and archaeology both demonstrate the linkages and entangled developments across several disciplines and how rearrangement of units of knowledge could effect intellectual change.

Knowledge was continually changing and should be changed. European attitudes toward knowledge bore no advantage over the many ways that knowledge had been organized around the world and throughout time, even in prehistoric civilizations. One of Major’s favorite sayings was that “barbarism does not consist in the lack of learning, but in the lack of care for the learning that one does possess.” He considered many of his contemporaries barbaric, such as publishers who would rather print novels than his works on collecting. In contrast to them, prehistoric German tribes were not barbarians.⁷⁶ This viewpoint inspired his project to investigate prehistoric civilizations using new tools and approaches, as discussed in Chapter 7.

Part IV, Spaces of Knowledge, explores what Major believed to be the first seminar to be offered in “experimental study” at a university. It sets research and teaching of experimental philosophy by Major and his colleagues at Kiel in the context of the very rapid institutionalization of experimental philosophy in universities across Central Europe. This effort was closely linked to Major’s study of collecting and curating, as he offered his experimental seminar out of his own collections in his home, which spurred his founding of yet another new discipline, the “taxis of chambers,” discussed in Chapter 9. Major aimed to shift practices of collecting, encouraging his contemporaries to value collections not for their exotic and priceless contents, but for how their arrangement might advance knowledge. Major turned to a study of global collecting practices as a means for establishing a state-of-the-art discipline of curation. In a radical departure from contemporary collecting practice, Major sought global views of collecting to inform the arrangement of local objects, such as fossils, stones, and shells that he collected himself on the beaches around Kiel. A brief conclusion in Chapter 10 highlights how the history of research can inform our current thinking about the research university and its disciplines at a time when we feel that we are also perched on the cusp of immense change.

2 Major’s Life and Setting

This chapter sets the stage of Major’s travels across the disciplines by describing his background, education, and local setting. The new University of Kiel founded in 1665, to which Major was recruited as the first chair of medicine and where he spent his entire career until his death in 1693, began as a cutting-edge institution whose daring intellectual positions were intended to augment the duke of Holstein-Gottorf Christian Albrecht’s reputation and claims to the region. Christian Albrecht was among the many German princes who valorized the usefulness of knowledge. These princes invested in infrastructures for the scholarly investigation of their territories.¹ However, Christian Albrecht’s tottering fortunes quickly left faculty members to their own devices. This not only allowed scholars to create space for research removed from the demands of a continually present patron. It also required them to become agile managers of their own careers who could quickly pivot from one patron and setting to the next. They became showmen, cultivating new audiences both within and beyond the academy and captivating them with thrilling manipulations of knowledge.

2.1 Major’s Early Life and Education

Johann Daniel Major was born to Maria Strofius (1594–1650) and Elias Major (1587–1669) in Breslau (today Wrocław in Poland) in 1634.² In 1631, his father had become rector of the Elizabeth Gymnasium, which Major attended. Major’s childhood in the thriving cultural center of Breslau introduced him to several of his lifelong interests, such as music, vernacular German poetry, collecting, and the study of local antiquities.³ The Elizabeth Gymnasium library was endowed with a rich collection of books, manuscripts, coins, art, natural objects, and other rarities, such as dug-up urns from so-called pagan burial sites. In 1699, these polymathic collections would be celebrated in a Latin school play in which the main figure, Curiosus (the curious one), explored the collections of the Elizabeth Gymnasium. The “curious one” discussed the collections in conversation with a range of interlocuters, including a historian, a philologist, a miner, a sailor, and a natural philosopher.⁴ During Major’s life, Breslau would become an important node of activity for the Academy of the Curious about Nature, founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt. Breslau municipal physician Philipp Jacob Sachs von Lewenheimb (1627–71, hereafter Sachs), would found the academy’s journal in 1670, and after his death in 1671, fellow Breslau physicians Heinrich Volgnad (1634–84) and Johann Jaenisch (1636–1707), would edit it. By 1680, ten Breslauers had been elected to the academy.

At the age of twenty, Major matriculated at the University of Wittenberg, studying with Johann Sperling, Conrad Victor Schneider, and Marcus Banzer and defending theses on the lungs and on tears in 1655 and 1656.⁵ He continued for further study at the University of Leipzig with Johann Michaelis and in Padua, where he matriculated in 1659. The surgeons Pietro de Marchetti and Antonio Molinetti had a particularly large impact on his training there. Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt (1669–1731), recalled in his memorial biography of Major that Paduan professor Carlo Offredi introduced Major at this time to his love of antiquities.⁶

Major also sought out circles of collectors and connoisseurs in nearby Venice. There Senator Giovan Francesco Loredano, a prolific author and member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, offered him not only access to his own collections but also a letter of introduction that Major could use to gain access to the collections of others. Loredano, a poet, operettist, satirist, and writer of fantasy, may have been one source of Major’s interest in such genres. Showcasing his sprezzatura, Major published a collection of epigrams dedicated to Loredano and in praise of Venice in 1660 that he supposedly dashed off while traveling by boat from Venice to Padua.⁷ Writing while en route would become a trademark of Major’s scholarly style.

Following his studies in Italy, Major then journeyed to Vienna and home to Breslau, before moving to Wittenberg to begin practicing medicine and to marry Maria Dorothea Sennert, the daughter of Wittenberg professor Andreas Sennert and granddaughter of renowned medical authority Daniel Sennert, in 1661. His wife died in childbirth in 1662 and their newborn daughter died shortly thereafter. In 1663, Major moved to Hamburg to work as a municipal pest physician. His career took a sudden swing for the better when his friend from Breslau, Sachs, worked to establish his reputation through a printed correspondence and nominated him to the Academy of the Curious about Nature. Major was elected in 1664. While in Hamburg, Major began publishing on what would become one of his most prized discoveries, infusions into the blood, and he defended this discovery on an international scale through correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Royal Society.

In 1665, at the age of thirty-one, Major was recruited as founding chair of medicine (responsible for theoretical medicine, botany, and chymia) in the new Christian Albrecht University of Kiel. That year, he also married Margaretha Elisabeth Pincier, the daughter of Hermann Pincier (1598–1668) of Lübeck and the niece of Paul Langermann, a Hamburg materialist (dealer in wholesale materia medica) and a famed collector.⁸ Hermann Pincier was a canon of the Lübeck cathedral and an advisor to the Gottorf duke as well as of the prince-bishopric of Bremen.⁹ Major and Margaretha Pincier had several children, one of whom, Margaretha Dorothea Major, later married Major’s successor in Kiel, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, the son of a Marburg professor, Johann Jacob Waldschmidt, who held the first chair of experimental philosophy in Europe.¹⁰ None of Major’s children appears to have continued his interests. One son, Detlev Johann Major, studied law at Kiel and became a local politician.¹¹

Major was not a family man. Major and his father Elias exchanged frequent, formal Latin letters on learned topics. Andreas Sennert also corresponded with Major often, long after the death of his daughter and usually in Latin.¹² Major’s second wife, Margaretha Elisabeth Pincier, wrote four letters to him before marriage and two letters afterwards (when she stayed in Lübeck with her mother briefly after the death of her father in 1668).¹³

Major hardly ever mentions his family; when he does, it is to complain about how his household and financial worries distracted him from his scholarly pursuits. In order to support his family, Major maintained a wide medical practice alongside his meager professorial salary. This medical practice constantly called him away from his experimental interests, as he complained to a colleague, Professor Georg Caspar Kirchmaier at Wittenberg, in 1680

How often have my eyes teared up and my heart itself nearly burst asunder in impatience, when I consider how miserably trapped I am in doing those daily labors and writing those frivolous prescriptions that a servant of an apothecary could write, and probably even more correctly. Meanwhile Mechanics (o, my mechanics!), Pyrotechnics, Hydraulics, Optics, Pneumatics, Stathmics, Architectonics, etc. suffer my neglect.¹⁴

Major describes himself as so busy that he barely had a moment to himself to think and write. Far from the bespectacled polyhistor tied to his study, Major wrote while wandering fields and forests as an escape from the demands of teaching, of his medical practice, and of his family.

For this has been the plan of my studies for a long time now: since at home not even a moment of time is available that I might devote to a gratifying meditation, I am only free to indulge in my little speculations while wandering through the fields and the woods. I write upon those [portable] writing-tables with the shaking hand of a moving body, despite heat, wind, or cold; unless I happen upon a fellow traveler on the road, often the attendant of some noble, who frequently disturbs me all the way to his lord’s estate and annoys me with useless chatter.¹⁵

He also complained publicly in printed works about the demands that his family members placed upon him. His need to support them through his medical practice dragged him away from the “enjoyable labors of experimental study” and forced him instead to travel to see patients.¹⁶

There was a silver lining to all these trips. Major made it his practice to use the time he spent traveling to see patients to think and write. As he rode through the region, he began to study it more and more in depth. Over time, what he called his “travelling notes” (Annotationes … itinerarias) grew in size to be a respectable scholarly output. Thinking and writing on the move changed the nature of his scholarship. It was too challenging to balance large folio volumes on the back of a horse or on the pommel of a saddle while one rode through all sorts of stormy weather, he complained. So, he left his books at home, with no other authorities to consult but his own mind and what he was seeing. This manner of working on the move, “far from books and under the open sky, demanded freer and more daring flashes of genius” (ingenii impetus).¹⁷

Over decades of visiting patients throughout the region, Major penned scores of creative short works. He also studied everything he could about the landscape he traversed. He eventually reshaped his “travelling notes” into his last great project, a total history of the local Cimbric peninsula beginning with its prehistoric settlement by humans. By the 1690s, he transformed this practice of traveling scholarship into a dedicated research journey specifically designed to complete his great “Cimbric Work.” He never did finish this work, as he died in 1693 while treating the Queen of Sweden, Ulrika Eleonora (1656–93). His casket was lost at sea; eighteen other people also lost their lives.¹⁸

2.2 Divided Loyalties and Scholarly Independence

The strategic peninsula of Jutland or Cimbria, stretching from the northernmost part of Germany into the northern Atlantic Ocean, was sliced into innumerable tiny, complex administrative regions, where power was shared and shifted often between Danes and Germans. It was split into the duchies of Schleswig, of Holstein, and of Saxe-Lauenburg; the Lutheran bishopric of Lübeck; and the free Imperial cities of Lübeck and Hamburg. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were held jointly by both the duke of Holstein-Glückstadt, that is, the king of Denmark, and the duke of Holstein-Gottorf. War in this region remained constant. Friedrich III, duke of Holstein-Gottorf (1597–1659), sought an alliance with Sweden by marrying his daughter Hedwig Eleonora (1636–1715) to King Charles X Gustav. Duke Friedrich died while besieged by Denmark in 1659. With the backing of Sweden, he had secured descent of the duchy to his son Christian Albrecht free of vassalage to Denmark; however, Denmark did not accept this claim. The new duke, Christian Albrecht (1641–95), attempted to broker peace by marrying, in 1667, Princess Friederike Amalie of Denmark (1649–1704). Friederike Amalie’s younger sister, Ulrika Eleonora, would later marry Charles XI of Sweden in 1675. Christian Albrecht’s domains would be invaded by his father-in-law and the duke would spend the years 1675–89 under house arrest in Hamburg until the signing of the Treaty of Altona. This war was not just regional. As Sweden and Denmark joined the European rush to global colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Sweden and Denmark came into conflict overseas, most notably on the Gold Coast of Africa.¹⁹

Ongoing violence made Kiel a deadly place, with quite a few soldiers involved in stabbings, duels, and shootings, sometimes of students. On one April day in 1680, seven hundred sailors marched through town from Hamburg, sent to serve the enemy fleet in Copenhagen. When some of them mutinied, they were shot and buried in Kiel.²⁰

In this setting, scholars could not envision a comfortable career of a court savant sheltered by a single patron. They regularly sought patronage on multiple sides of this war zone. The physician Caspar Danckwerth (1607–72) dedicated his 1652 New Description of the Two Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to both Duke Friedrich III of Holstein-Gottorf and to King Friedrich III of Denmark (1609–70).²¹ Both Friedrichs appeared on the title page of Danckwerth’s work, along with six figures illustrating the different ancient Germanic and Slavic peoples who purportedly made up the population of the region, a Cimbrian, a Jute, an Angel, a Saxon, a Frisian, and a Wend. This open relationship with competing political powers continued with the founding of the university. As Bernd Roling has observed, “As at almost no other university in Germany, the professors of the Gottorf university operated within the difficult overlap of Danish and Swedish interests, without surrendering entirely to one side or the other.”²²

In the 1660s, Major was casting about for a patron. He dedicated his 1664 work on intravenous injections to a counselor of Sweden resident in Hamburg as well as to a patrician of Nürnberg.²³ In 1665, Major dedicated a work on a “monstrous plant” in the Gottorf garden to the court chancellor Johann Adolph Kielman von Kielmansegg.²⁴ He dedicated the first public human anatomy he performed at Kiel to Duke Christian Albrecht, as well as a 1668 discussion of the American aloe blooming at the Gottof court to Duchess Friederike Amalie. That year, Duchess Marie Elisabeth of Saxony (1610–84), a major collector and the mother of Christian Albrecht, gave Major a live coati from “Virginia,” which he raised in his house.²⁵

Major dedicated the 1670 edition of his vernacular account of an ideal polity of learning, Voyage to a New World, to von Kielmansegg’s two sons, the Gottorf counselors, Hans Heinrich (1626–86) and Friedrich Christian Kielman von Kielmannsegg (1639–1714). An appendix at the end detailed the experiments with a camera obscura and anatomies of the eye he performed in the castle at Eutin for the duke’s brother, August Friedrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (1646–1705), the bishop of Lübeck. His 1670 edition of the curriculum of an experimental seminar he offered at Kiel noted how his students were performing the same experiments that he had displayed before the bishop at Eutin the year prior.²⁶

Major described these experiments and demonstrations at Eutin again in his dedication to August Friedrich of his 1675 study of Fabio Colonna’s work on ancient purple.²⁷ The Eutin court offered Major a sanctuary during violent times and an audience for experimentation. It included among its courtiers Christian Cassius (1609–76), director of the chancellery in Eutin, who also served Christian Albrecht as a Gottorf court counselor.²⁸ In 1666, Major dedicated a new edition of his volume of poetry praising Venice, the city whose art was famous for its use of color, to Cassius, whom Major descrbed not only as his great patron but also as a connoisseur and collector, “endowed with consummate experience in the most select things.”²⁹ Johann Möller, aka Moller (1661–1725), in his reference work on the learned of the region, detailed at length Cassius’ many travels and learned connections. According to Cassius’ eulogizer, if “everyone whom he inspired in their studies gathered together in one place, it would found a new Cassian Academy.”³⁰

Christian Cassius’ brother was the Hamburg physician Andreas Cassius II (1605–73), who developed a form of red glass by suspending salts of gold and tin in the glass, now known as Purple of Cassius. Andreas Cassius had lengthy chemical experience, defending an iatrochemical dissertation at Leipzig in 1629 and collaborating on experiments with Joachim Jungius in Hamburg in the 1650s; Cassius would serve as the executor of Jungius’s will.³¹ Like Major, Cassius studied color change as part of a much wider scientific interest in the nature of color, the way it changed due to the interactions of acids and bases, and what this meant for understanding of blood circulation.³² Andreas Cassius’ son, Andreas Cassius III (1645–1700), defended a dissertation presided over by Major at Kiel in 1666.³³ He also dedicated a 1685 work on gold to the duke, where he described his father’s process for the Purple of Cassius.³⁴ Such were the interests of the figures before whom Major performed his color change experiments at Eutin.

All the while, Major still sought alternative patrons across enemy lines. He dedicated a 1667 work in which he responded to doubts about his medical invention of intravenous injections to Brandenburg elector Friedrich Wilhelm, another military enemy of Gottorf and Sweden. He dedicated a 1667 collection of his medical inventions to Burchard von Ahlefeld, the regional counselor of the King of Denmark, a “great patron” of his who, alongside many other local prominent figures, had attended his public human dissection at the university.³⁵

Like Major, the von Ahlefeld family often switched between service to the Gottorf duke and the Danish king. Major’s relationships with this family were manifold and enduring. In 1679 Major named Burchard von Ahlefeld an “exquisite patron of experimental philosophy” and described how von Ahlefeld used burning mirrors in his garden, not to destroy hostile ships as Archimedes had, but to force refractory exotic plants to submit to him [presumably by increasing the heat of the garden].³⁶ Major performed a demonstration of his newly invented art of blood infusions before Detlev von Ahlefeld, who had sent him a small hibernating mammal.³⁷ In his research notes, Major described Detlev as a “learned nobleman” who had “diligently” written a study of ghosts in German but never published the manuscript.³⁸ In Kiel, Major resided in a house owned by Cay von Ahlefeld. Several members of the von Ahlefeld family studied at Kiel, and Benedict von Ahlefeld was one of Major’s lodgers.³⁹ In 1670, Major thanked Danish Major-General Claus von Ahlefeld (1614–74, who had married a natural daughter of Christian IV of Denmark), a major figure in the Dano-Swedish War, for a gift of barnacles from Norway. Major called him “his patron” and noted that besides his martial glories, Ahlefeld was also a connoisseur of select works of art and nature.⁴⁰

Most of all, Major interacted with Friedrich von Ahlefeld (1623–86), who had become Danish governor (Statthalter) of the region, and, after 1676, Danish chancellor. Major noted in one of his several dedications to Ahlefeld how his experimental study had been “carried out thus far miserably under the yoke of war, although surviving death and always remaining in the hope of less rocky times.”⁴¹ He sought asylum with von Ahlefeld and was granted a quiet nook in von Ahlefeld’s well-equipped library. There he realized that von Ahlefeld was among the brightest lights of Denmark, akin to Bacon and Boyle in England. Joachim von Ahlefeld (1646–1717) served first Denmark, the Holstein-Gottorf, then Denmark again.⁴² In 1690, Major would praise him as a patron of his and note that his living chameleon, whose body was given to Major to dissect upon its death, was only the second such animal that had ever visited the region (the first was the Gottorf chameleon of 1626).⁴³

The extensive research that Major did over several decades on the history of the Cimbric peninsula required not only the patronage of Duke Christian Albrecht, who ordered keepers of archives to open their volumes to him, but a wide network of collectors who might send him objects and information and local landowners who might permit excavations on their property and allow Major to keep his finds for the purposes of research. This included not only the Ahlefeld family, but many others in the region such as the Rantzau and von Thienen families, who were all densely networked by intermarriage. Major traveled around the region, treating many members of these families in his medical practice. For example, Dorothea Øllegaard Rantzau (née Blome, ca. 1625–95), wrote to Major desperately from this branch’s seat at Putloss a week before her husband’s death.⁴⁴ Over the course of thirty years Major used “over a thousand medical trips,” paid for by his patients, as a means to gather research notes about the entire peninsula.

In 1675, both Christian Albrecht’s duchy and the bishopric were invaded by Denmark. The Gottorf duke was forced by Denmark to retire to Hamburg for fourteen years, and the chancellor Kielmansegg and his three sons, Major’s former patrons, were taken as prisoners to Copenhagen, where the chancellor died four months later.⁴⁵ The Kielmansegg sons naturalized in Denmark, marrying into the Ahlefeld family and into the family of Conrad, count von Reventlow, a Danish courtier. They served the Danish court the rest of their lives.⁴⁶ For the 1683 edition of his Voyage to a New World, Major selected count von Reventlow as his dedicatee. He also benefited from other Danish patronage. He thanked one Detlev Lütghen, the prefect of “Frederik’s Bastion,” a rampart formerly ringing Copenhagen, for giving him a previously unknown caterpillar.⁴⁷ Major also praised the learning of the Danish court. He noted how Frederik the III of Denmark (1609–70) ordered the digging of many giants’ bones that were still kept in Copenhagen as a rarity, which proved the Danish king’s “enlightened understanding, exceptional prudence, and experience in many noble sciences and arts that he loved.”⁴⁸ In his 1670 medical experimental course, he offered a list of the four greatest patrons of experimental learning ever – one was the Danish king.⁴⁹ When Major traveled to Copenhagen in 1693, as he recorded in his travel account, the king allowed him to visit the Royal Danish Kunstkammer as freely as he wished, which was not permitted to others.⁵⁰ Across enemy lines, Major enjoyed excellent relationships with Danish scholars.⁵¹ The respect was mutual.⁵²

In 1680, at a political low point for the Gottorf duke, Major would be invited to join the medical faculty in Copenhagen, an invitation he declined. He did have his eye on Leopold I’s Vienna (although that city would also suffer an invasion by Ottoman troops in 1683), which perhaps explains the title he gave to his planned magnum opus, the Leopoldine Theater of Nature. Ultimately, he remained at Kiel until his death in 1693. His loyalty was rewarded in 1683, when he was at last appointed as the physician of Christian Albrecht, at the time in exile and under house arrest in Hamburg.⁵³ Nevertheless, Major refused to accept a court position at Gottorf. As Major wrote to a friend, he turned down opportunities for a court career in both Copenhagen and Gottorf, to the amazement of many. His candor and strong desire for liberty (“libertatis inexpugnabili desiderio”), as well as his inability to navigate a political setting, had kept him from court employment.⁵⁴

2.3 State-Building and Regional Knowledge Infrastructures

Major strove for intellectual independence. In many ways, the military situation of the region required this, as he continually relied upon patronage from multiple sides of armed conflicts. Yet, at the same time that he attempted to disentangle knowledge from power, he also benefited from the ways that regional heads of state competed through their epistemic infrastructures such as libraries, collections, gardens, and universities. Cutting-edge political theory of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries encouraged the development of collecting and knowledge management practices. A previous Danish governor (Statthalter) of the region, Heinrich Rantzau (1526–99), had overseen the Methodus Apodemica of Albrecht Mejer (1528–1603), which became a classic work for learned or methodical travel, training travelers in the collecting of empirical information by following a preordained set of commonplaces.⁵⁵ Johann von Wowern (1574–1612) of Hamburg, who published an early and influential work on polymathy in 1603, became the councilor of Duke Johann Adolph of Holstein-Gottorf (1575–1616) and the governor of Gottorf Castle.⁵⁶ The political theorist, Hermann Lather, in a 1618 work dedicated to the next duke, Friedrich III, discussed the political utility of investing in a Kunstkammer, even when it contained apparently useless things.⁵⁷ Friedrich III, who ruled from 1616 and was one of the noble founders of the learned poetical society, the Frunchtbringende Gesellshaft, followed Lather’s advice, patronizing many works of learning as demonstrations of statecraft.⁵⁸

Economic advice of the period “reason of state” also encouraged competing princes to promote urbanism, settlement, industry, investment, and global trade.⁵⁹ Competing with Glückstadt (“Happy Town”), the town founded in Holstein in 1616 by Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648), Duke Friedrich III founded his own ideal town, Friedrichstadt, in 1620, to which he lured settlers of many religions with the promise of freedom of religion. Glückstadt and Friedrichstadt were among the earliest of the forty “refugee-cities” that competing heads of state would found, mostly in the Holy Roman Empire.⁶⁰ Altona, controlled by Denmark from 1640, also became internationally known as a religious refuge, although it remained technically Lutheran. Competing with neighboring Hamburg in granting rights of settlement to religious minorities, Altona allowed Ashkenazi Jews to settle there by 1612, while Sephardi Jews settled in Hamburg. Mennonites, Labadists, Catholics, and other non-Lutherans were also attracted to Altona.⁶¹

Regional rulers also competed on a global stage. Christian IV granted a patent for a joint-stock company to trade to Asia in 1616, which succeeded in founding a trading post at Tranquebar in Ceylon in 1620 (which would remain under Danish control until 1845).⁶² Duke Friedrich sent a series of diplomatic envoys, first to Muscovy in 1634–5 and then to the court of Shah Safi (1611–42) in Persia in 1635–9, in order to establish a silk road he hoped would reach from Asia to Friedrichstadt.⁶³ The Gottorf court savant, librarian and curator, Adam Olearius (1603–71), published many works advertising the voyage, winning an international readership through translations into Dutch, Italian, French, and English. Olearius translated Sa’di’s Persian Gulistan into German with the help of Hakverdi (Hakk-wirdi), a legate from the Shah who came to Gottorf with his son in 1638 and remained there with a brief stint aiding Dutch scholars in the Netherlands in the 1640s, until his death in 1650. His son, baptized as “Johann Georg” at the age of 29 in 1647, was knowledgeable in the art of gunnery, having gained experience in Dresden, Gottorf, and Copenhagen. He became the chief gunner of Gottorf.⁶⁴

In 1651, Duke Friedrich acquired one of the famed collections of Bernard Paludanus (1550–1633), making it the basis of his own collection and entrusting it to the care of Olearius. The duke’s collection was global in scope, with a special emphasis upon Persia, Muscovy, and the far North, such as Greenland. Rather than works of European painting and sculpture, it specialized in global naturalia and human artifacts, as well as in humans themselves. Via Paludanus’ collection, Gottorf held a mummy from the West Indies (which Olearius suggested might be from Chile).⁶⁵ Three living Greenland women, Cabelou, Gunelle, and Sigjo, were sent from Copenhagen to Gottorf in the late 1650s. Olearius included their portraits in his catalog of the collection.⁶⁶

The political and military significance of the collection was immediately apparent upon entering the Gottorf Kunstkammer. According to Olearius’ catalog, the first object one saw was a massive jawbone from a whale whose body had been 62 feet long. The whale was found in the year 1659, the year that peace had been declared between Sweden and Denmark, and thus it was known as the Fish of Peace.⁶⁷ The collection also held a less sanguine omen; two swordfish found in 1643, shortly before Sweden launched an attack upon Holstein and Denmark (the Torstenson War).⁶⁸ Another object, not cataloged by Olearius but described by the Swedish traveler Nils Rubenius in 1662, embodied the inescapable violent conflict of the region: four entangled antlers representing the kings of Sweden and Denmark and the mutual destruction toward which their ceaseless fighting would lead. As visitors to Gottorf were told, in the middle of a war of Sweden against Denmark, a hunter surprised two stags, who so entangled their threatening antlers within each other that they could not be disentangled, so that they remained entrapped. One of the stags died, and the other was so weakened by dragging around the dead body of its opponent that it easily fell into the hands of the hunter.⁶⁹

War shaped the collection not only in its content but also in its organization. Packed and moved for safekeeping, only to be unpacked and repacked again, the collection was made mobile by war. Perhaps this was why, as Major noted, the Gottorf collection had been rearranged more than three times by 1670.⁷⁰ In 1676, the librarian Marquard Gude sent a flurry of letters to the Gottorf duke about how he was attempting to preserve the court collection in the face of an invasion. Six Danish companies of two hundred men had entered the town of Schleswig outside Gottorf. He had packed items item up in wooden chests, each containing an inventory of their contents to send away. However, he hesitated to send off the most expensive manuscripts, many of which contained paintings. The Kunstkammer too was composed mostly of old and fragile natural specimens that would suffer horrible damage if they were transported overland.⁷¹ The Gottorf Kunstkammer, a collection of major economic value, was preyed upon by Danish forces.⁷² Hauled piecemeal to Copenhagen between 1710 and 1720, the remainder was delivered en masse to Copenhagen in 1721, where it remains today.⁷³

In the preface to his 1666 catalog of the Gottorf collections, Adam Olearius alluded delicately to the competing collections in the area and their intersections with the battlefield. The region afforded two neighboring potentates who were singular connoisseurs (Liebhaber) both of natural rarities and artifice, namely, King Friedrich III of Denmark to the north in Copenhagen and Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg to the south in Berlin. Both of them had visited and praised the Gottorf collection, and both had endowed it with notable gifts. The Danish king had also recently arranged a chamber of art and rarities in Copenhagen, which was growing larger on a daily basis. The elector of Brandenburg had also assembled a celebrated collection.⁷⁴

What Olearius did not note in his catalog, but did in a history of Holstein, was that the elector’s visit to the collection occurred during a military campaign. Friedrich Wilhelm and his officers occupied Gottorf castle for four days, taking in the collections and the library at their leisure. The elector was able to see only half the collection because part of it had been moved to a safer location. Nevertheless he admired it, remarking that he would have wished to have had the chance to speak with its owner, because he was such an “art-loving Lord,” in peaceful circumstances. Before his troops departed, the elector enriched the collection “with some art pieces he happened to have on him, and others that he had sent later.”⁷⁵ This bizarre exchange of niceties and collectibles in the middle of a military occupation illustrates the degree to which the collection was enmeshed in territorial aggression.

Friedrich also highlighted his global ambitions through a moving planetarium, the Gottorf Globe, that was set outside in magnificent gardens. A rotating circular room, the globe could fit twelve people, who could thus, as it were, climb into the heavens and observe the stars move, up close and personally. A pendant Copernican sphere was held indoors.⁷⁶ He also founded a cutting-edge chymical laboratory. Duke Adolf I of Gottorf (1526–86) had earlier established the glass industry in Holstein by recruiting the glassmaker Franz Kunckel in 1575. His son, Jürgen Kunckel, supplied the Gottorf laboratory with its specialized glassware. Jürgen’s son, Johann Kunckel (1630–1703), who grew up in this exciting laboratory atmosphere, became one of Europe’s premier experimenters with novel forms of glass. Kunckel himself supplied Duke Christian Albrecht with 60 Reichsthaler worth of glass in 1665.⁷⁷

Duke Friedrich III patronized several impressive scientific works, such as editions of alchemical works and the “Gottorfer Codex,” a magnificent botanical manuscript now in Copenhagen.⁷⁸ In 1651, Samuel Hartlib in London approvingly noted (as he was informed by his son-in-law and Gottorf political agent, Friedrich Clodius) how the Gottorf duke hired two individuals to make “daily Indices Materiarum on all the Bookes of his library.”⁷⁹ The need to index the contents of the library’s books on a daily basis indicated the size and rapid growth of the collection. The manuscripts of the Gottorf library included works in Arabic and Chinese, as well as letters in “Muscovite” and Persian sent to Duke Friedrich.⁸⁰ It became a hotbed of state-of-the-art librarianship, under the care of successive librarians, Olearius, Marquard Gude (1635–89), and Johann Nicolas Pechlin (1644–1706).

Court dances and ballets were another form of cultural expression that intersected at the time with martial exercises of the noble body. Reflecting the court collections, they staged costumed figures from throughout time and around the world such as “an ancient Franconian man” and contemporary Greenlanders.⁸¹ Olearius composed a dance of “Oriental women from various nations” in one of his court ballets.⁸² For a masquerade celebrating the birthday of Duke Christian Albrecht in 1669, Kiel University professor Daniel Georg Morhof staged global ancients: warring Romans, Cimbrians, Amazonians, and “various others from around the world with their slaves.”⁸³

In addition to the resources of the Gottorf court, the region was home to the collection of the bibliophiliac court chancellor, Johann Adolph Kielman von Kielmansegg (1612–76), further expanded by his son, Friedrich Christian, to 50,000 volumes.⁸⁴ The journalist Eberhard Werner Happel (1647–90) opined that no library anywhere could boast as great a quantity of the newest and rarest authors as the Kielmansegg collection.⁸⁵ Kielmansegg was an author himself, having written several printed and manuscript works celebrating the duchy and its political supremacy.⁸⁶ Daniel Georg Morhof celebrated Kielmansegg in fifteen poems, and Major dedicated several works to him (as well as to his sons). Many other impressive libraries graced the region, although several of them, such as those belonging to the noble families of Rantzau and Ahlefeld (whose collection Major had often used), were consumed by wartime conflagrations.⁸⁷ Ducal, noble, clerical, and professorial libraries were integrated into the Kiel University library, which was frequently cataloged, and, under the librarianship of Daniel Georg Morhof, made numerous purchases.⁸⁸ As in other libraries of the period, the university library boasted not just books but also objects, such as globes and mathematical instruments, and a book-wheel, handy for keeping several volumes open for reference at a time.⁸⁹

The city libraries of Lübeck and nearby Hamburg also offered well-stocked shelves. Hamburg’s library, which held a significant collection of natural specimens and instruments in addition to books, was curated by David Schellhammer (ca. 1629–93), Major’s frequent correspondent on museal issues. Hamburg possessed the most private libraries of any European city in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁹⁰ It is thus not surprising that the region gave rise to authoritative studies on excerpting, indexing, and other forms of knowledge management by Morhof, Vincent Placcius, and others.

2.4 The Founding of the University of Kiel

The area’s massive collections were touted as resources for the university. A nearly 700-page celebration of the duchy’s efforts in patronizing learning served as the inaugural text for the university, highlighting the Gottorf sphere, court library, ducal coin collection, and Kunstkammer. It was composed by an international adventurer and political agent, a Dalmatian-born baron who worked for various polities across Europe, including the king of Sweden.⁹¹

Both this account and others advertise the Gottorf collections, accessible by boat from Kiel, as a resource for the university. The population of Kiel was minuscule. However, the investments that Gottorf dukes had made in international diplomacy, laboratory investigations, botany, mechanical invention, and collecting made it a far more culturally rich region than we might assume. An innovative curriculum that made use of these collections attracted students from all over.

In his publication on the American aloe that bloomed in the garden of the Gottorf castle in 1668, Major also described the resources at Gottorf, such as the castle library, laboratory, chamber of art and armaments (“Kunst-und Rust-Kammer”), and a garden that was not just a “Theater of Nature” but a “residence of Nature, Art, and all the graces.”⁹² Caeso Gramm, Major’s colleague on the medical faculty at Kiel, likewise celebrated these collections in his New Parnassus of Holstein.⁹³ Kiel mathematics professor, Samuel Reyher (1635–1714), dilated at length on the Gottorf court in a series of accounts of princely lovers of mathematics. Reyher praised the library, the Kunstkammer (which held concave mirrors, a magic lantern, and a model of an Italian theater), and the garden. The garden’s pleasurehouse, the Amalienburg, built for Duchess Friederike Amalie, contained a camera obscura, telescopes, microscopes, and beautifully turned objects. Christian Albrecht, Reyher hastened to add, did not spend all of his time in turning, like some princely ivory turners. Rather, the duke continually practiced the arts of war, both during wartime and in peace. Reyher listed all the disciplines to which these mathematical holdings at Gottorf pertained: Civil architecture, catoptrics, dioptrics, scenography, garden architecture, hydraulics, optics, curious mechanics, defensive military architecture, offensive military architecture, and tactics.⁹⁴

The Gottorf court afforded global collections and viewpoints that might be unexpected in a town as tiny as Kiel was (Figure 2.1). Thus, for instance, Reyher incorporated a discussion and depiction of Greenland canoes in analyzing the dimensions of Noah’s ark.⁹⁵ When Reyher shifted to take up the chair of natural law in 1692, he not only taught German and Roman law but also “Turkish, Persian, Chinese, and African law.”⁹⁶ Major often makes reference to items in the Gottorf collection, as do his students.⁹⁷ The Gottorf keeper of collections, Adam Olearius advised Major on attaining his position at Kiel. Olearius often asked Major to communicate with his father-in-law, Hermann Pincier of Lübeck, over the purchase of books for the Gottorf library, as well as with his colleagues at Kiel such as Daniel Georg Morhof.⁹⁸ Major called Adam Olearius’ catalog of the Gottorf collection “unusually learned.”⁹⁹

Figure 2.1 Map of Kiel.

Caeso Gramm, Chilonium novus Holsatiae parnassus (Schleswig: Holwein, 1665). Royal Danish Library, DA 40:1-308 4.

From his teaching at Kiel through his collection, discussed in Chapter 9, Major would develop his distinctive approach to museology based on a series of studies of global curation practices. In doing so, he situated the relationship between knowledge and the globe differently than did the court. For the Gottorf dukes, microcosmic collections, including the celebrated Gottorf Globe, symbolized their princely territorial ambitions. It was very apparent how such collections entangled with power and with conflict. The globe itself would be born away to Russia by Tsar Peter the Great, where it remains today; a reconstruction has been installed in Gottorf.¹⁰⁰ By establishing his own collection for his teaching, rather than making use of the ducal collections, Major created a space that separated knowledge production from power. Amid the “unpleasant din of wars” raging outside, within his collections, Major and his students played a much more pleasant wargame through experiments researching the shifting taxis of various groupings of salts, which sometimes attacked one another with loud explosions and at others, bonded together in peace treaties.¹⁰¹ Kiel students came from all sides of the regional conflict. In 1680, botany professor Johann Nicolas Pechlin even praised how battle offered students opportunities for hands-on learning, as in the case of Caspar March, Jr., who spent two years treating the soldiers of Gottorf’s enemy, the elector of Brandenburg, “and by means of much and varied treatment, tested and proved his studies.”¹⁰²

Despite the active warfare, students flocked to Kiel from both German-speaking lands and Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, as well as from further places such as Scotland, Hungary, France, and Lwów.¹⁰³ Some stopped at Kiel during farflung academic travels, a practice that increased intellectual communication between universities. A handful of those who studied at Kiel were more diverse than we might assume. According to the biobibliographer Johann Möller, Henrica Maria Schellhammer (1684–1720), the daughter of Kiel University professor Günther Christoph Schellhammer and the learned Maria Sophia Conring (1614–1719), was “educated at Jena and at Kiel,” although she did not formally inscribe as a student.¹⁰⁴ In his autobiographical novel, Eberhard Werner Happel (who inscribed as a student at Kiel in August 1673) described a fellow student, an American born in Chile and brought by the Spaniards to North Africa. He converted to Judaism in Fez, where he studied medicine. After his Moroccan patron’s death he continued on to France and Germany, practicing his art, until at last he was baptized at Kiel where he studied medicine and the art of artillery at the expense of the Gottorf duke. He spoke Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and the “Slave or Francken-Speech” of North Africa. In Latin, he liked to pun cleverly, “Chili sum natus, Kilii sum renatus” (I was born in Chile and reborn in Kiel).¹⁰⁵ One would assume this was a fiction of Happel’s were it not confirmed by an entry in the album of students in June 1673 of an American student named after the local Duke Christian Albrecht (“Christianus Albertus Kielius Americanus”), with a note that he had registered for his studies for free.¹⁰⁶

As a new institution, Kiel aimed to make a name for itself by offering an innovative curriculum offering the latest and most controversial views and novel forms of learning (Figure 2.2). Kiel’s chair in the law of nature and nations was “the first of its kind in a faculty of law.”¹⁰⁷ At his first academic event, the professor of philosophy Michael Watson presided over a dissertation on the trending topic of antediluvian history.¹⁰⁸ Theology professor Christian Kortholt chose a dissertation on Greco-Roman paganism, Islam, and Judaism. This advised students to consult a particularly wide array of modern Hebrew authors, whose texts they could access by studying Hebrew with Professor Matthias Wasmuth.¹⁰⁹ To celebrate his appointment as professor of ethics at Kiel, Adam Tribbechow published a polemical work, On the Scholastic Doctors and the Science of Divine and Human Things Corrupted by Them, dedicated to Duke Christian Albrecht. This work, republished in 1719, would inform wider views of the “scholastics,” including those of Jakob Thomasius, Pierre Bayle, and others.¹¹⁰ Once Tribbechow arrived in Kiel, he presided over a dissertation on The Moral Philosophy of the Barbarians, Particularly of the East. This recuperated the identity of the barbarian against Greek prejudice; Tribbechow announced that he also hoped to publish more on the moral philosophy of the barbarians of the North and the South.¹¹¹ Daniel Georg Morhof trained students in cutting-edge criticism that set an international standard.¹¹² Samuel Reyher taught all manner of mathematics, engineering, optics, and astronomical observation. In December 1667, Reyher and Major would collaborate on a month of public programming related to optics. As Major performed public anatomies of the eye of an ox, a sheep, a mole, an owl, and a fish and displayed a human eye with its muscles, trochlea, and nerves, which he had dried and affixed to a board, Reyher brought out his array of optical devices and performed experiments relating to the anatomies; they both published their own invitations to the public.¹¹³

Figure 2.2 Kiel University professors.

Caeso Gramm, Chilonium novus Holsatiae parnassus (Schleswig: Holwein, 1665). Royal Danish Library, DA 40:1-308 4.

Major was recruited to be the first chair of medicine after making a name for himself through his contentious invention of intravenous injections and his research on the touchy question of the nature of fossils. As discussed in Chapter 8, he may have been the first in Europe to offer a regular academic course in the experimental study of nature beginning in the late 1660s.¹¹⁴ In 1671, Major wrote to Duke Christian Albrecht to suggest that he might be granted an additional position, perhaps as a professor of “experimental studies” (studii experimentalis).¹¹⁵ Had the duke agreed, this would have been the first professorship of experimental natural philosophy in Europe. The duke did not, but when Major’s son-in-law became professor of experimental natural philosophy at Kiel upon Major’s death in 1693, it was still one of the first professorships of its kind in Europe.

2.5 Self-Censorship, Radical Ideas, and Naturalism

Although many faculty at Kiel offered innovative curricula, they did not run afoul of political or religious authorities due to their radical ideas. In Enlightenment Underground, Martin Mulsow has traced the story of an invisible Enlightenment beginning in the late seventeenth century, as scholars self-censored in print but circulated radical ideas in manuscript.¹¹⁶ Major practiced some self-censorship, although as the vast majority of Major’s manuscripts have not survived, it is impossible to gage to what extent he did so. In one case, when his friend Sebastian Scheffer pointed out that his incidental discussion of church history in one of his works might land him in hot water, Major acted quickly to locate and destroy the already published copies and to republish a self-censored version.¹¹⁷

Major had other techniques for protecting himself from censure. He distinguished his area of interest sharply from theology. His investigations centered on “human knowledge.”¹¹⁸ He was most interested in “many select, mathematico-technical parts of secular polymathy.”¹¹⁹ It was within this realm of the “Encyclopaedia of Secular Science”¹²⁰ that scholars were most at liberty to philosophize.¹²¹ Even in print, it is not always easily visible when Major takes a radical or new position due to another strategy he employed. He uses commonplace metaphors or concepts in a novel way that undercuts their older meaning, but which makes it difficult to ascertain such departures at first glance. And then, there were some topics where his positions become a little vague.

The very controversial topic of the relationship between mind and matter, and what it implied for the authority of theology over natural philosophy, was one arena in which we can see all three of these strategies in play. The subject on which this centered was “spirits.” Galen had established a system of natural, vital, and animal spirits, but René Descartes and Thomas Willis fundamentally transformed the meaning and function of these spirits, as discussed further in Chapter 8. This was a controversial topic. Descartes dualistically divided between the incorporeal mind and the corporeal body, whose apparent forms of cognition such as sense could be attributed entirely to corporeal spirits. Willis’ studies of the brain countered several of Descartes’ views and offered a system that could attribute even more cognition to the material brain rather than the incorporeal mind.

Major, whose based his ideas on both Descartes and Willis, often refers to the brain in ways that we might expect would apply more to the mind. He attributes many ideas (including those of Descartes, who believed he was able to separate his thinking from his body), to the interactions of material corpuscles with the unique textures of brains. These differed for every individual, with profound implications for the reliability of abstract thinking; it was pointless to sit alone in a room, as Descartes claimed to do, and merely think of a philosophical system. Those abstract ideas were not separated from materiality, but fundamentally shaped by materiality. As a result, all thought had to begin with the anatomical study of the human and an understanding of how that anatomy shaped the knowledge that humans produced. Major would develop a view of the encyclopedia of all knowledge based on this approach, which he named “experimental anthroposophy,” as discussed in Chapter 5.

Major even seems to suggest support for naturalism, a form of deism that replaced revealed religion with the study of nature. This was a prominent topic at Kiel. In 1683, Kiel professor of theology Christoph Franck presided over a dissertation by Johann Dieckmann, an employee of the Swedes in Stade, on naturalism as a belief system as it might be understood from the manuscript Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime.¹²² This dialogue between seven sages, each of a different religion, unfolded in a universal collection of nature called a pantotheca. The collection physically embodied their harmony despite their very divergent views, including those of a “naturalist” who rejected any divine revelation. Only six square feet large, the pantotheca was divided into six square cabinets, each subdivided 36 times, storing 1,296 little containers. The normative public museum that Major would open in 1688, discussed in Chapter 9, recalls many features of the pantotheca, including its small size, physical arrangement, contents, and the character of conversation that the collections were designed to inspire.

As it was possible to read the Colloquium in support of religious equality in “a powerfully subversive way,” it became “one of the most frequently copied manuscripts circulating in the ‘radical Enlightenment.’”¹²³ In 1684, Major characterized Dieckmann as a great polymath and his friend and patron, and at the end of his life, he would note that he had seen a manuscript of the Colloquium in Copenhagen.¹²⁴ In his work of 1683, Dieckmann described how he had diligently searched for the manuscript and at last located two parts of it in a French translation collected by Queen Christina of Sweden, a copy of which he brought to Germany. Daniel Georg Morhof, who had supplied a liminary poem to Dieckmann’s 1683 publication, thanked Dieckmann for giving him the manuscript to read. Morhof also cited at length from it in his Polyhistor, which was closely based on his lectures to students, especially concerning the arrangement of the pantotheca. It reminded Morhof of several other collections, including Vincent Placcius’ excerpt cabinet in Hamburg, discussed in Chapter 4.¹²⁵ Dieckmann’s dissertation was republished in 1700, the same year that a history of naturalism by Kiel Professor Adam Tribbechow was published posthumously.¹²⁶

The commonplace way to address the relationship between revealed religion and nature was via the two books of God: nature and scripture. This was ordinarily deployed to support a form of natural theology; studying nature should correlate with and give insight to the divine word. Major deployed this commonplace in a way that reversed the hierarchy between nature and scripture and also shifted the aim. The goal was not knowledge of the divine, but knowledge of nature. Humans possessed two means for investigating natural things (“zur Erforschung natürlicher Dinge”): the word of God and the Light of Nature.¹²⁷ Major defined the “Light of Nature,” as a “healthy reason based on experience” (“auf Erfahrung gegründete gesunde Vernunft”).¹²⁸ Major sharply limited the Bible as an authority in studying nature. As he wrote, “it is well known that the main aim of the Holy Spirit in the Bible is not to teach a complete natural philosophy, but with heavenly and divine teaching, to call humans to salvation.” To some degree, scripture pointed out some aspects of nature to notice.¹²⁹ Meanwhile, the experience of natural and artificial things through the five senses stimulated followers of philosophy with “a sweet itching” that they could not resist.¹³⁰

By contrast with this limited ability of the Bible to inform natural knowledge, Major endows the light of nature with great agency to lead humans into a divine path. In his learned fantasy, Voyage to a New World, Major characterized the “Light of Nature” as illuminating a “Philosophical way to Heaven” available even to those who had not received the divine revelation. They could read the “ABC” of nature, putting together words and syllables until they had interpreted many pages of the “Book of the entire visible World” without the aid of Aristotle nor his commentators.¹³¹ This made the residents of his intellectual Utopia, the Cosmosophs, appear to be “terrestrial gods.”

2.6 Building the University Infrastructure

The university occupied the grounds of the old Franciscan cloisters. It lacked purpose-built academic spaces such as an anatomical theater and associated collections and laboratories or a botanical garden. Such amenities served as attractions as universities competed for foreign students.¹³² As Gerhard Wiesenfeldt has argued, the “introduction of the experimental study of nature should be understood … not only as a new natural philosophical orientation, but also as a reform of academic education.”¹³³ Leiden enjoyed a botanical garden and an anatomical theater with a collection of curiosities, especially under the direction of the fervent collector, professor of anatomy, Otto Heurnius (1577–1652).¹³⁴ Major’s Danish colleagues also enjoyed a new Anatomical House, with its associated collections.¹³⁵ Of course, it was difficult to compete with Padua and its amenities.

To study anatomy as elegantly as possible, wrote the envious Major, it was most necessary “to have a commodious Anatomical house divided into distinct locked chambers (conclavibus).” Otherwise, it was impossible to pursue anatomy in a way that might satisfy the “curious and increasingly judgmental condition of this experimental century, because along with determination and ingenuity, it requires an apt place [locum commodum], expenses, leisure, material fit for experiment, a lack of family cares and any other plunderers of time, and many other things.”¹³⁶ He wished he could enjoy the facilities available to Heinrich Meibom, Jr. (1638–1700) at the University of Helmstedt’s new Anatomical House; however, even Meibom had to perform most of his experiments at home, lacking a university laboratory.¹³⁷

Major began to teach out of his own collection in the late 1660s and later transformed this teaching collection into a normative public museum, the Museum Cimbricum, which opened in 1688. This became a resource for both the public and the university. As Major’s son-in-law, Wilhelm Ulrich Waldschmidt, said in his eulogy delivered to an academic audience at Kiel in 1694, “You know how many times you have looked around that theater of things for curious contemplation, his Kunstkammer and Museum Cimbricum, which he has for many years been engaged in developing, sparing no effort nor expense.”¹³⁸ Waldschmidt claimed that Major’s museum, so admired by visitors, brought glory to the university. It was indeed admired by visitors, such as the medical student Caspar Bartholin the younger.¹³⁹ However, this collection was assembled at Major’s own expense.

In establishing the university’s botanical garden, Major was also largely on his own. As he complained, he and his students and lodgers worked for days at a time for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, demolishing the old ramparts of the ducal summer castle and moving earth.¹⁴⁰ In a lengthy 1674 account he wrote for his successor as director of the garden, Professor Pechlin, Major complained about how the garden lacked a chamber where the professor and student could meet during bad weather and where botanical works might be stored alongside tools and seeds.¹⁴¹ Major discussed at length the garden’s personnel and his own expenses. He often traded knowledge for garden materials. For example, he gave an expensive copy of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia to the gardener at Husum in exchange for plants.¹⁴² He also privately instructed Georg Martin Tatter, the son of the Gottorf head gardener, Michael Gabriel Tatter, in the art of medicine for a year. In exchange, all he got was a set of twelve painted heraldic arms to hang about the garden; they were painted so poorly, “against all optical rules” (“wider alle optische Raison”), that he had to have them repainted at his own cost.¹⁴³

In 1669, the university received an external review in a “visitation” headed by Gottorf court chancellor, Kielman von Kielmansegg. The reviewers issued a resolution suggesting to the Gottorf duke that, just as the medical faculty were being assisted in finding necessary places for a garden and for anatomy, a suitable place should be found for Professor Reyher’s “specula” or optical collections, as well as space for exercises in engineering fortifications.¹⁴⁴ Soon thereafter, Reyher imagined the physical infrastructures he would love to see in a pedagogical edifice in a Latin dissertation, On the Mathematical Kingdom, over which he presided in 1670. Such a structure would be particularly useful in the education of princes.

Both Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Johann Daniel Major’s fantasy Voyage to a New World (discussed in Chapter 3) inspired On the Mathematical Kingdom.¹⁴⁵ Reyher particularly admired how Major had so elegantly sketched the aerial Kingdom of the Cosmosophs and all the disciplines in the form of a palace, divided in various chambers. He imagined a “mathematical kingdom” as an edifice for teaching without books, containing chambers of twenty-seven different mathematical disciplines, from algebra to steganography, each brimming with instruments and objects. For example, the pyrotechnic chamber would be divided into four parts. In one corner were demonstrations of ways of igniting a fire. In another were furnaces for foundries, cooking, hatching eggs, and heating rooms. Military equipment like bombs could be found in the third and the fourth, handily near all sorts of instruments and materials for extinguishing fires. Pneumatics, or the study of air, held many kinds of instruments from aeolipiles, thermometers, baroscopes, glass tears, artificial wings, speaking statues, simulacra of animals that could produce sounds, to mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, prisms, etc. Reyher directed the reader to his recent publication, On Air, where he discussed thirty-seven instruments.¹⁴⁶ The room of tactics would contain toy soldiers that could be equipped with tiny exploding bombs, like the troop of silver soldiers the King of France had commissioned a few years before from Nürnberg craftsmen and given to the Dauphin.¹⁴⁷

Nothing that Reyher imagined would be built at university expense, although Reyher, like Major, used his own collection for teaching. Then as now, laboratory sciences required a very significant financial investment. Were they worth it? In 1668, alchemist and commercial advisor Johann Joachim Becher argued for the political and economic benefits of a collection-based education; it would serve as a “noble magnet” to attract talents into the territory. It would not, Becher claimed, cost more than a typical court ballet, but it would suffice to restore a declining university or a gymnasium back to “the most flourishing state” (“in den besten Flor”).¹⁴⁸ Major’s colleague at Kiel, Daniel Georg Morhof, concurred with Becher’s advice. If a prince were to found such a collection, Morhof predicted (in Kiel seminar lectures from the 1670s that were published in 1688), it would attract such a large number of students that it would easily pay for itself. Moreover, it would entice a large number of curious individuals to visit it and to enrich the theater with their donations, so that the entire universe of things would be able to be seen beneath one roof. Craftsmen might also be tempted to visit and participate if the collection were well endowed with the mechanical arts. This collection could then become, as Becher had promised, a center for learning many arts.¹⁴⁹ In 1674, University of Leiden professor Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) succeeded in gaining both a theater for experiments (in addition to the anatomy theater Leiden already possessed) and the ability to offer instruction there in experimental natural philosophy (physica experimentalis) by persuading the University of Leiden curators that it would attract “many students from other academies and schools.”¹⁵⁰

Due to the regional warfare in which it was enmeshed, the University of Kiel not only failed to develop these academic collections but lost many of the regional private collections upon which it relied. When Johann Christian Fabricius (1745–1808) was forced to move from Copenhagen to the University of Kiel, which was then integrated into the Danish-Norwegian state, he vociferously objected at teaching in a backwater institution. Many collections were destroyed by war or redistributed to Copenhagen or St. Petersburg, and Fabricius’ attempt to offer a collection-based education at Kiel in the 1780s was stymied by the continuing lack of a university collection.¹⁵¹ The glory days of Gottorf were gone.¹⁵²

2.7 Conclusion

“In worldly affairs,” maintained Major, “there is a right to philosophize freely.”¹⁵³ The ideal of the liberty of thought, although later associated with Spinoza, is an ancient one.¹⁵⁴ Major’s war-torn region however, lent particular urgency to the creation of some buffering between knowledge and power. Knowledge and power were tightly interwoven by warring principalities. Universities, collections and laboratories showcased the prince as the rightful steward of the land, but when those princes went to war, knowledge did too. If scholars could not disentangle knowledge from power, then, like the dead deer whose horns were preserved in the Gottorf collection, they would perish together.

The view from Major’s war-torn region offers a different story from that of the court savant in the emerging absolutist state to which we are more accustomed. It also queries accounts of the research university that see the state as the main driver in its development. As Chapter 3 explores, Major and his contemporaries developed academic practices designed to minimize prejudice and to question human authority. They did not craft these practices by bureaucratic fiat. Yet, practices and concepts of what made good research remained in place even when scholars did indeed try to turn disciplines toward more utilitarian ends. The buffer that had been constructed between knowledge and authority produced better knowledge, which in turn, could be more useful.

As Dominik Hünniger has described, in the late eighteenth century, Johann Christian Fabricius worked to develop a political education at Kiel that would be directly useful to the state. To achieve this, he demanded the freedom (Freyheit) to express views openly on political issues. Candor was integral to usefulness. Educated men would be useful to the state only if they were able to judge affairs impartially.¹⁵⁵