Aufklärungs-Dinge

Martin Mulsow
Aufklärungs-Dinge
Zweifler und Verzweifelte im Umbau des Wissens um 1700
Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach publishing house, 2024
ISBN: 978-3-8031-3726-5
304 pages
32 EUR

Martin Mulsow presents objects and intellectual adventurers of the early modern period and thus visualises their universe. Strange apparatuses, figures and caricatures crystallised a desire for radical thinking that was to unhinge the world.

A peep box, an Indian figure, a sleeping fur, gold coins, a divining rod, branched trees and a silen bust: Martin Mulsow, a tireless chronicler of the early modern period, uses these seemingly ancient, exotic or enchanted objects as a starting point to drill deep into the world around 1700 and lead us into the bubbling Age of Enlightenment, full of detailed knowledge.

Far removed from heroic tales and the routines of triumphant history, the fates of scholars who were ready to explode the old world with their thoughts, but despaired of the grievances and comfort of their fellow human beings, come to light. The result is a proliferating web of knowledge made up of cool rationality and the occult, as well as sometimes dark, sometimes glamorous worlds of reading and books made up of holy seriousness and biting mockery.

The intellectual climate of an era becomes almost palpable, an era that rose to question what had been accepted for thousands of years: a thoroughly alien age that gave the starting signal for a revolution of scepticism that continues to this day.