Sensing the Unknown: Worlds of Knowledge and Natural History in England and the English Empire (17th/18th Century)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Daniela Hacke
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534066342

Sensing the Unknown examines the sensory practices that heterogeneous actors in England/London as well as in the Atlantic (North America) and Pacific (Japan/Ceylon) regions developed in order to analyze, to better understand, to more precisely represent, and to embed the unknown plant and natural world in a knowledge praxeology that bears genuinely early modern features. The form and shape of knowledge production was and is closely tied to the perception of the world through the sense and to the interpretation of the results of sense-based methods of exploration in communicative contexts. This process is understood in this research project as information and knowledge production. With the focus on non-European contexts, indigenous "knowledge carriers" also come into view, who interpreted a natural world unknown to European eyes (and noses and mouths) – Sensing the Unknown! In both projects, London/Royal Society functioned as a "center of accumulation" as a place of collection and further processing, whereby the practices of collecting, verifying, and systematizing information and knowledge took place in geographically distant locations. With these focal points in mind, the project analyzes the sensory-based practices of knowledge collection of selected actors as a contemporary relevant method reflected by the actors and uses the methodological potential of sensory history for the history of knowledge in the early modern period. Sensing the Unknown is working on these topics in two doctoral projects: A project on "Natural Histories: Information and Knowledge Acquisition in the Context of the Royal Society" and a project on "Of considerable efficacy: production and transformation of medical-botanical knowledge between England and North America"

• DFG Programme: Research Grants