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Acknowledgements -- List of illustrations -- Note on the editor -- Notes on the contributors -- Introduction / Cornel Zwierlein -- In parte d'infedeli: a papal informant in Istanbul (1607-1608) / Edoardo Angione -- The album Amicorum of the Athonite monk Theoklitos Polyeidis and the agency of perambulating Greek alms collectors in the Holy Roman Empire (18th Century) / Stefano Saracino -- The great imposture: Eastern Christian rogues and counterfeiters in Rome, c. 17th-19th centuries / Cesare Santus -- Nomads in the early modern republic of letters: the transient correspondents of Henry Oldenburg and the Early Royal Society of London / Iordan Avramov -- Travelling scholastics: the emergence of an empirical normative authority in early modern Spanish America / José Luis Egío -- Johann Heinrich Callenberg's Orient / Simon Mills -- Solomon Negri: the self-fashioning of an Arab Christian in early modern Europe / Paula Manstetten -- From erstwhile captive to cultural erudite: the career of Korean-born Samurai, Wakita Kyūbei / David Nelson -- Stories of Spanish captivity in Istanbul: from trauma to empowerment / Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez -- Between America and the Maghrib: the Marquis of Varinas and the weapons of the exile / Adolfo Polo y La Borda -- In the blind spot of the state: Trieste in the 18th-century trans-imperial Adriatic Society / David Do Paço -- Religious feeling and the construction of a merchant's identity in the Greek trade networks of the late eighteenth century / Maria-Tsampika Lampitsi -- From Bern with love: the spy with a taste for the exquisite in early modern Istanbul / Marloes Cornelissen -- Dispersed things: European merchant households in the Levant / Cornel Zwierlein -- Index.

Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676) They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities

Die Frühe Neuzeit ist die Zeit der Umgestaltung Europas, der Transformation politischer Herrschaft, von Wirtschaft, Kultur und Wissenschaft und der globalen Vernetzung. Politische Theorie, von Machiavelli, über Bodin, Hobbes und Locke bis zu namenlosen Autoren von handschriftlichen Gutachten, Kameralismus-Kompendien und merkantilistischen Kleinschriften prägten diese Prozesse. Das Buch führt Studierende vom Bachelor- bis zum Master-Niveau anspruchsvoll und zugleich verständlich in diese faszinierende frühneuzeitliche Welt ein.

Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on the Editor -- Notes on the Contributors -- List of Illustrations and Tables -- Introduction: Towards a History of Ignorance -- Part 1 Law -- Chapter 1 Law and the Uncertainty of Value in Late Medieval Marseille and Lucca -- Chapter 2 Nescience and the Conscience of Judges. An Example of Religion's Influence on Legal Procedure -- Chapter 3 Speaking Nothing to Power in Early Modern Germany: Making Sense of Peasant Silence in the Ius Commune -- Part 2 Economy -- Chapter 4 Coping with Unknown Risks in Renaissance Florence: Insurers, Friars and Abacus Teachers -- Chapter 5 (Non-)Knowledge, Political Economy and Trade Policy in Seventeenth-Century France: The Problem of Trade Balances -- Chapter 6 Ignorance in Europe's State Financial Culture (Eighteenth Century) -- Part 3 Semantics -- Chapter 7 Voluptas Carnis. Allegory and Non-Knowledge in Pieter Aertsen's Still-Life Paintings -- Chapter 8 Humanist Styles of Reading in the Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton -- Chapter 9 Coexistence and Ignorance: What Europeans in the Levant did not read (ca. 1620-1750) -- Part 4 Political and Scientific Communication -- Chapter 10 Ignorance about the Traveler: Documenting Safe Conduct in the European Middle Ages -- Chapter 11 International Crises as Experience of Non-Knowledge: European Powers and the 'Affairs of Provence' (1589-1598) -- Chapter 12 Dealing with Hurricanes and Mississippi Floods in Early French New Orleans. Environmental (Non-) Knowledge in a Colonial Context -- Chapter 13 'Unknown Sciences' and Unknown Superiors. The Problem of Non-Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Secret Societies -- Chapter 14 Specifying Ignorance in Eighteenth-Century Cartography, a Powerful Way to Promote the Geographer's Work: The Example of Jean-Baptiste d'Anville -- Part 5 Theory

2 Religion: Empires Ignoring, Learning, Forgetting ReligionsEntangling Powers of Non-Knowledge between West and East (Greek Church, Samaritans, Phoenicians); English Chaplains versus French State Catholicism: Conditions and Functions of Non-Knowledge Communication; Comparison and Conclusion; 3 History: How to Cope with Unconscious Ignorance; The Forgotten Arabic Middle Ages; Growing Awareness; Structure Replaces Content; Standardization and Spatialization; Conclusion; 4 Science: Mediterranean Empires and Scientific Unknowns; From Avicenna to the Queries of the Royal Society (1692).

Die Studie untersucht Umfang und Wahrnehmung grosser Brandkatastrophen der Vormoderne sowie die Entwicklung des Versicherungsprinzips und der Feuerversicherung vom 15. bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. In der Vormoderne stellten Stadtbrände eine der grösstmöglichen Katastrophen überhaupt dar: Sie vernichteten alles Hab und Gut, brannten Städte bis auf den Grund nieder und markierten zugleich die Grenzen der Beherrschbarkeit der Natur. Feuerversicherungen waren seit dem 17. Jahrhundert als Vorläufer heutiger Versicherungsgiganten die frühesten Formen institutioneller serieller Katastrophenbeobachtung. Cornel Zwierlein verfolgt Umfang, Charakter und Wahrnehmung grosser Brandkatastophen der Vormoderne, die Entwicklung des Versicherungsprinzips und der Feuerversicherung in Deutschland und England von der Frühzeit im 15. bis in die Hochzeit der Globalisierung im 19. Jahrhundert, von Istanbul über Kalkutta/Bombay bis in die USA. Die Studie liefert damit einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Katastrophen- und Sicherheitsgeschichte.

"Over 8,200 large city fires broke out between 1000 and 1939 CE in Central Europe. Prometheus Tamed inquires into the long-term history of that fire ecology, its local and regional frequencies, its relationship to climate history. It asks for the visual and narrative representation of that threat in every-day life. Institutional forms of fire insurance emerged in the form of private joint stock companies (the British model, starting in 1681) or in the form of cameralist fire insurances (the German model, starting in 1676). They contributed to shape and change society, transforming old communities of charitable solidarity into risk communities, finally supplemented by networks of cosmopolite aid. After 1830, insurance agencies expanded tremendously quickly all over the globe: Cultural clashes of Western and native perceptions of fire risk and of what is insurance can be studied as part of a critical archaeology of world risk society and the plurality of modernities"--

European merchants in their factories ('nations') in the Eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule were not really colonizers; in early modern times, they were somehow privileged guests. However, they deserve an important part in a long-term history of types of 'close distance' and forms of segregational coexistence. Different from recent studies that stress a strong overall interaction, understanding, sharing, and exchange between Europeans and Ottoman subjects, it is proposed to distinguish three levels: (1) The daily commercial interaction of Western Europeans with their Ottoman counterparts; (2) the stronger involvement in some politico-religious struggles (the 1724 schism in the patriarchate of Antioch serves as example): also here, one has still to distinguish between real interest in the religious cause and other activities as credit lending; (3) the care for and maintenance by the Europeans of their own Western national culture abroad: these cultural activities served more to (eventually unconsciously) perform 'boundary work' and to close up the 'nation'. These early modern forms of close distance and segregation were only isomorphic but not homologous with later highly conscious colonial and modern imperial forms of contact between 'West' and 'East' as in the nineteenth-century European settlements in Istanbul.

L'ambito della storia della sicurezza è cresciuto rapidamente negli anni recenti – nonostante appaia ancora quello meno indagato all'interno dell'ampio contesto interdisciplinare degli studi sulla sicurezza. L'articolo cerca di disegnare un schizzo dello stato dell'arte, sottolineando tre aspetti: in primo luogo, una (tuttora assente) storia della sicurezza di età rinascimentale – la storia dell'iniziale concetto di sicurezza collettiva transterritoriale sviluppato nell'ambito del sistema degli Stati italiani del Quattrocento; in secondo luogo, lo sviluppo della sicurezza come principio guida dell'amministrazione interna allo Stato soprattutto nell'Europa continentale nei secoli XVII e XVIII; in terzo luogo, le sfide di una storia della sicurezza ambientale come storia delle relazioni transterritoriali e transnazionali tra economie politiche, natura e volontà di fornire sicurezza (a esseri umani, Stati, imperi).