Modes of tradition, Modes of inspection, Modes of application: Assigning meaning to artefacts of divination in Europe from the 17th to the early 20th century

• Applicants: Dr. Thomas Eser; Professorin Dr. Ulrike Ludwig
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 343497955

The desire to foretell the future is a constant phenomenon in the individual and collective human experience. For thousands of years, humans interpreted either reputed natural or artificial signs in order to cope with the contingency of future events. Although practices of divination were important and prevalent for a long time, one can observe that after the middle of the 17th century, divination increasingly lost its significance and especially its legitimacy as an established mode of production of knowledge across Europe.This dissociation or estrangement is demonstrated by the fact that divinatory artefacts were no longer used for their original purpose. Instead, they became objects of museum collections and were thus embedded into entirely new contexts. The main focus of the project is the history of the (re)interpretation of divinatory objects as well as the act of collecting these objects for museums.The project comprises of two subprojects that build on each other chronologically. The subproject that covers the Early Modern Period focuses on collections at European courts (Dresden, Wolfenbüttel, Munich) between the 17th and the early 19th century. What characterizes these collections is that the relevant artefacts were already compiled systematically during the heyday of divinatory practice in the early modern era. With the decline of clairvoyance, however, these artefacts were precisely not removed from the collections. Rather, they remained an element of the representative programme of the cabinets of curiosities at European courts. Thus, the collections offer a look beyond the frequently polemicized debates of the proponents of the Enlightenment: the focus lies on transitional phenomena regarding the attitude towards divination in the late Early Modern Period as well as how the decline of its former significance was processed by contemporaries. Located at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg), the second subproject subsequently explores the beginnings of collecting written and material divinatory sources for institutionalized museums, particularly of the 19th and early 20th century. As scientific theory at the time scorned sources of historic prognostication with the fighting word superstition, the subproject focuses on the following questions: Which aversive or affirmative curatorial attitude was displayed towards such sources in the early period of modern museums? How was this attitude expressed in the composition of the collection and its presentation? What were the visitors reactions to the artefacts of divinatory practice that museums showcased?With its crossepochal approach, the proposed project will determine to what extent princely and bourgeois collections contributed to the historization of divinatory practices and their devaluation as ridiculous and dubious modes of the production of knowledge.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants