Lecture Series: History of Knowledge, Histories of Knowledges: Premodern Jewish Epistemes and Their Contexts

The field of the history of knowledge has expanded remarkably in recent years. While earlier scholarship focused primarily on educational institutions and intellectual traditions, contemporary research examines a much wider range of knowledge production and transmission, including non-elite and indigenous cultures, practical expertise, oral traditions, and artisanal skills. This expansion has fostered new interdisciplinary fields and comparative frameworks, with scholars increasingly engaging across different cultural and methodological traditions to develop connected histories of knowledge that encompass the spectrum of elite and non-elite forms.
Recent approaches to Jewish knowledge emphasise the social and material contexts of learning, questioning traditional boundaries between scholarly and popular cultures through concepts like ‘textual communities’ and ‘communities of practice.’ Methodologically, there is growing attention to the materiality of knowledge—including manuscripts, printed books, images, objects, and spaces—alongside digital tools for data analysis and visualisation. This ‘Ringvorlesung’ series will emphasise diverse perspectives on pre-modern knowledge and learning, particularly encouraging focus on Jewish epistemic milieus in contact and conversation with non-Jewish contexts and addressing the challenges posed by varied disciplinary approaches and historiographical traditions to multiple forms and ways of knowledge-making.

Thursdays, 16:00-17:30
Philosophikum (103), Room 0.204 [S76]
Lecture series in the Studium Integrale programme: https://klips2.uni-koeln.de/co/ee/ui/ca2/app/desktop/#/slc.tm.cp/student/courses/548360?$ctx=lang=EN&$scrollTo=toc_overview

Everyone is welcome!

Programme

April 16: Zvi Kunshtat (Frankfurt), “Watch and Learn: How Clocks Transformed Ashkenazi Schooling and Synchronized Early Modern Ashkenazi Communities”

April 23: Pavel Sládek (Prague), “Early Modern Jewish Practices of Reading and Why there Was No ‘Knowledge Explosion’ among Jews”

April 30: Roni Cohen (Frankfurt), “Manuscripts, Gamblers and Medieval Hebrew Hits”

May 7: Ilona Steimann (Münster), “Books, their Makers and Owners in an Age of Migration (DFG Project): Ashkenazi Book Collections in Italy”

May 21: Simone Hallstein (Köln), “Als wir sie Brauchen müssen sollen wir reden mit den Jüden dz sie das mügen auch versteen: Die Hebräische Bibel in christlicher Polemik: Wissensaneignung Stern des Meschiah (1477) des Petrus Nigri”

June 11: Anna Rutkowski (Köln), “Vom Hebräischen ins Jiddische und zurück: Menachem Amelanders Sheyres Yisroel und die Weitergabe jüdischen historischen Wissens”

June 18: Andreas Lehnertz (Trier), “Jewish Crathspeople and Crathy Knowledge in Medieval Ashkenaz”

June 25: Magdaléna Jánošı ́ková (Amsterdam), “Odd Man Out: Jewish Physicians, Medical Writings, and the Limits of Epistemic Communities in Early Modern Europe”

July 9: Katelyn Mesler (Heidelberg), “A Dozen Lives of Perets Trabot: Rabbi, Poet, Scribe, Schoolteacher, Lexicographer (14th-16th Centuries)”

July 16: Hanna Gentili (Hamburg), “Material, Social and Cultural Contexts of Fitheenth-Century Jewish Philosophy”

July 23: Agata Paluch (Köln), “How-To Books, Practical Knowledge, and Everyday Kabbalah in Early Modern Ashkenaz”