Cognition And The Book: Typologies Of Formal Organisation Of Knowledge In The Printed Book Of The Early Modern Period

The printed book, the most important invention of the early modern period, brought about not only an explosion of knowledge, but also major changes in the perception of texts. This volume investigates the methods by which knowledge was presented to the early modern reader and the organisation of material that guided his cognition of them. It focuses not merely on book-historical questions, but on the intersection of layout and paratexts with issues of genre, content and intended function of texts. A team of experts in various disciplines, English, French, German, Neo-Latin, philosophy, art history, the history of science and book history, makes a first effort to understanding this fascinating topic.

Contributors include: Maximilian Bergengruen, Manuel Braun, Kai Bremer, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Romy Günthart, Detlef Haberland, Frans A. Janssen, Jörg Jungmayr, Ursula Kocher, Robert Luff, Ann Moss, Wolfgang Neuber, Matthijs van Otegem, Hilmar M. Pabel, Thomas Rahn, Paul J. Smith, Dietmar Till, Ian F. Verstegen, and Claus Zittel.

Karl Enenkel teaches Latin and Neo-Latin literature in the Department of Classics, Leiden University. He is the author of Francesco Petrarca: De vita solitaria, Buch 1. Kritische Textausgabe und ideengeschichtlicher Kommentar (1990), Kulturoptimismus und Kulturpessimismus in der Renaissance (1995), and numerous articles on Italian and Dutch humanism.
Wolfgang Neuber, Ph.D. (1980) in Philosophy, University of Vienna, is Professor of Early Modern German Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He has published extensively on the history of rhetoric, on travel accounts and on mnemonics.