of such knowledge inside and outside the scholarly community;
advancement of such knowledge beyond the status quo.
Accumulation, Consolidation, and Organization of Knowledge
Knowledge has to be consolidated and organized to yield its significance and allow for systematic augmentation. Such consolidation and organization takes two forms (not entirely new, but significantly invigorated in the eighteenth century): the collection and pertinent arrangement of plant, animal, and cultural specimens from non-European parts of the world, and the critical assembling of what has appeared in print concerning those regions. The former would lead to the establishment of institutions such as botanical and zoological gardens and ethnological museums, the latter to universal histories, encyclopedia entries, and, above all, to collections of travel accounts and book series specializing in exotic travelogues, with libraries taking a middle position between institutional and publishing enterprises.
Botanical and zoological gardens that scholars established (with the help of a vast network of overseas contacts) everywhere in Europe — from Albrecht von Haller’s Göttingen and Carl von Linné’s Uppsala to Buffon’s Jardin du Roi and Joseph Banks’s Kew Gardens, from the Imperial Menagerie at Schönbrunn to the zoo added to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris — recreated foreign habitats, with the accent on the exotic strongest perhaps in the Jardin d’Acclimatation des
7 Geschichte der Schiffahrten und Versuche, welche zur Entdeckung des Nordöstlichen Weges nach Japan und China von verschiedenen Nationen unternommen worden (Halle, 1768), 3, http://www.e-rara.ch/download/pdf/15216751?name=Geschichte der Schiffahrten und Versuche welche zur Entdeckung des Nord%C3%B6stlichen
végétaux exotiques in Nantes.8 More important from an anthropological viewpoint were (in the absence of nineteenth-century Völkerschauen à la Hagenbeck) ethnological museums featuring the artifacts of exotic populations. Evolving from earlier “cabinets of curiosities” both natural and artificial, these collections included Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s
“Ethnologische Sammlung”, incorporated into the Göttingen University Akademisches Museum in 1773, Hans Sloane’s myriad of artifacts (ranging from bark textiles to fishing hooks) that were acquired through an Act of Parliament in 1753 and incorporated into the British Museum as well as the turn-of-the-century acquisitions of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. They all held sizeable contingents of objects brought home by the “philosophical voyagers” of the time, Cook and the Forsters prominently among them.9 Similarly, Napoleon’s Egyptian loot, secured thanks to the expertise of scores of savants recruited for his military expedition of 1798, ended up in various European collections, including the British Museum, which to this day displays the Rosetta Stone that was one of the major objects of scholarly interest and cultural consequence at the time, opening up, after Champollion’s decipherment, a whole new intellectual world.
That such collecting activity, which brings into the Europeans’
full view the worldwide diversity of cultural self-expression, has an educational aspect is self-evident. Johann Gottfried Gruber, a universal historian, spelled it out in 1798 apropos of Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa: nothing less than “true humanity” had
8 Jean-Marc Drouin and Luc Lienhard, “Botanik,” Albrecht von Haller: Leben — Werk — Epoche, eds. Hubert Steinke et al. (Göttingen, 2008), 309 (Linné); Hubert Steinke and Martin Stuber, “Haller und die Gelehrtenrepublik,” ibid., 400–401 (Haller); Lucille Allorge and Oliver Ikor, La Fabuleuse Odisseé des plantes: Les botanistes voyageurs, les Jardins des Plantes, les herbiers (Paris, 2003); Hector Charles Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks, K.B., P.R.S.: The Autocrat of the Philosophers (London, 1952), ch. 2; P. Huard and M. Wong, “Les Enquêtes scientifiques françaises et l’exploration du monde exotique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extrême orient, LII (1964), 143–154.
9 P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 58–59; Hans Plischke, Die ethnographische Sammlung der Universität Göttingen: Ihre Geschichte und ihre Bedeutung (Göttingen, 1931); E. St. John Brooks, Sir Hans Sloane: The Great Collector and his Circle (London, 1954), ch. 11; Sir Hans Sloane, ed. Arthur MacGregor (London, 1994), 228–244; James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas, eds. Brigitte Hauser-Schäublin and Gundolf Krüger (München and New York, 1998); Justin Stagl, Eine Geschichte der Neugier: Die Kunst des Reisens 1550–1800 (Wien, 2002), 142–152.
developed from the new awareness of such diversity.10 More concrete were the 1741 instructions for guides in the “Wunderkammer” of the Francke Foundation in Halle (which boasted Egyptian mummies, ritual objects from India, articles of clothing from China and Greenland among its many artifacts): the main purpose of the collection was “to bring the whole world (natural objects as well as artifacts) together here in miniature, […] not just to be looked at but for the benefit of local pupils as well as others so that early in life they may gain a better idea of God and the world.”11
As for the newly emerging written knowledge about the world at large, the obvious collection points were the libraries, private, public or in between. Goethe’s systematic efforts, as director of the Ducal library, to secure vast amounts of exotic travelogues for Weimar have only recently been uncovered.12 He also described what he believed the reading of such works would provide for the general reader in landlocked provincial Germany: “magnificent instruction,” “thorough insight,”
“pure humanity,” in a word: such works “enlighten” us — surely a broadly educational effect.13 It was, however, the Göttingen University Library that established itself as the foremost eighteenth-century German treasure house of recent travelogues. This was due to the farsighted educational initiative of Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, the spiritus rector of the young university, who issued a “decree that voyages and travel accounts were to be acquired as comprehensively as possible,”14 and to the untiring curatorial efforts of classics professor Christian Gottlob Heyne, who was director of the library from 1763 on.
The Göttingen holdings of travelogues served as source material for the scientific disciplines that were just then establishing themselves:
geography, anthropology and ethnology. Both Blumenbach and
10 Blumenbach, Über die natürlichen Verschiedenheiten im Menschengeschlechte, ed. and trans. J. G. Gruber (Leipzig, 1798), V–VI, http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/
show/blumenbach_menschengeschlecht_1798
11 Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, Die Wunderkammer: Die Kunst- und Naturalienkammer der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle (Saale) (Halle, 1998), 37.
12 Karl S. Guthke, Goethes Weimar und die “große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden, 2001).
13 Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 1. Abt., VII, 183, 216–217; cp. Guthke (n. 12), 90–91.
14 Cited from Bernhard Fabian, Selecta Anglicana: Buchgeschichtliche Studien zur Aufnahme der Englischen Literatur in Deutschland im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1994), 187.
Christoph Meiners, the other leading Göttingen ethnologist at the time, could plausibly claim that they had read, for the benefit of their scholarly work, every exotic travel account that the library owned.15
Meiners called his ethnological survey of the “great map of mankind” Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785). Such universal histories sprang up everywhere now (Isaak Iselin, August Ludwig Schlözer, Voltaire, Herder, etc.), and they might just as well have been called ethnological surveys, as Gruber, the editor of one of them, frankly admitted.16 The towering monument of the genre, the seven-volume Universal History (London, 1736–1744), was not slow to point out the educational value and function of such a conspectus of “all Times and Nations”: “Every judicious Reader may form […] Rules for the Conduct of this Life” as he becomes an “Eye-witness” of world history — and thereby of the ways of exotic populations (I, v). Much the same can be claimed for the many comprehensive encyclopedias published in several European languages at the time whose précis of knowledge about the non-European world derived from the myriad travel accounts of the century as well. Recent studies have tellingly brought to light just how such encyclopedic enterprises functioned in popularizing an enlightened awareness of expanding horizons, thereby offering their readers a compact course in global education.17
Of similar interest as vehicles of communication addressing audiences within or beyond the fringes of the scholarly community are those enterprises (often firmly in the hands of bona fide scholars such as Haller, A. G. Kästner, J. R. Forster, C. D. Ebeling, J. Bernoulli, Blumenbach, and the cartographer John Green) that critically coordinated those proliferating exotic travelogues that were the source material of encyclopedia entries, universal histories, and ethnographical treatises.
The resulting compilations of such travel accounts — several of them at any rate, notably Blumenbach’s Sammlung seltener und merkwürdiger Reisegeschichten (1785) and Thomas Astley’s New General Collection
15 Hans Plischke, Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs Einfluß auf die Entdeckungsreisenden seiner Zeit (Göttingen, 1937), 3–4; Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 228–229 (Meiners). See ibid., 228–
240: “The Scientific Use of Travel Reports.”
16 Guthke (n. 4), 42–48.
17 See the pertinent chapters in Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, ed. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Göttingen, 2006).
of Voyages and Travels (4 vols., 1745–1747, incomplete) — aspired to critical evaluative procedures in the selection, correction, revision, arrangement, authentication, and annotation of their material, unlike their predecessors.18
Astley’s compilation, which was translated into French and German, also hinted broadly at the educational effect and ideal implied in the purveyance of such reliable information about faraway lands and peoples; speaking of the “Knowledge […] attained of the greater Part of the Earth, till then quite unknown,” it stated: “By these Discoveries, a new Creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth, seemed to be opened to the View of Mankind; who may be said to have been furnished with Wings to fly from one End of the Earth to the other, and bring the most distant Nations acquainted” (I, 9). Awnsham and John Churchill, in their Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1704), had been more concrete: readers could, “without stirring a foot, compass the Earth and Seas, visit all Countries and converse with all Nations” (I, lxxiii). Haller, a lifelong avid reader of travelogues, “whose mind contains the world”
as the motto to J. G. Zimmermann’s 1755 biography had it, described the educational value to be derived from such reading in 1750, in the preface to a collection of travel accounts entitled Sammlung neuer und merkwürdiger Reisen, zu Wasser und zu Lande: “Through [such accounts] we become familiar with the world and compensate somewhat for the lack of personal experience.” Being educated (“erzogen”) in a country whose citizens all share the same beliefs, morals, and opinions, Europeans are prone to “prejudice.” To overcome it, nothing is more commendable than familiarity with many peoples of different customs, laws, and mindsets. As a result, one arrives at a true understanding of human nature and of oneself. This in turn means that one becomes attuned to the “voice of nature […] which all peoples share,” be they Romans or Khoikhoi, Swiss or Patagonians.19 The same large-scale educational
18 William E. Stewart speaks of the “Verwissenschaftlichung” of such collections in the second half of the eighteenth century; see his Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn, 1978), 53. On John Green as editor of the New General Collection, see Horst Walter Blanke,
“Wissenserwerb — Wissensakkumulation — Wissenstransfer in der Aufklärung:
Das Beispiel der Allgemeinen Historie der Reisen und ihrer Vorläufer,” Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, 140. Blumenbach’s critique is reprinted in Plischke (n. 15), 75–78.
19 Sammlung kleiner Hallerischer Schriften, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1772), I, 135–138.
thinking was the rationale behind the publication of seemingly interminable series of individual travelogues such as those launched, with the advice of Goethe, Blumenbach, and other scholars, by Friedrich Justin Bertuch from his Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar (along with his various ethnological and geographical handbooks, journals, and school books). But it was Johann Heinrich Campe, followed by the above-mentioned Hermes, who made this rationale explicit by addressing his several series of travelogues, principally about non-European regions, to the school-age population, and we have Hermes’ word for it that Campe, by enlarging knowledge of the world and its peoples in this way, did indeed succeed in revolutionizing what Hermes emphatically called “Bildung” in German-speaking territories, by the beginning of the nineteenth century at the latest. Further confirmation of the ideal of global education taking hold is to be found in the upswing of geography teaching in schools, championed as early as 1769 by Herder as a way of
“bringing about an era of Bildung in Germany,” with learned authors of textbooks frequently making the point that global education was now, by the mid-eighteenth century, entering into serious rivalry with humanistic pedagogy.20 The conviction of various scholars, Haller, Goethe, Kant, Georg Forster, and Antoine Galland included, that reading travelogues was equivalent to travelling the world had evidently borne fruit: travelogues “worked to bring about Bildung of every reader”
(according to Forster).21
With these observations, the consolidation and organization of knowledge have already shaded into the diffusion or transfer of educationally relevant information.
20 On Campe, see Stewart, 236–249; on Hermes, see n. 6; on schoolbooks, see Guthke (n. 4), 73–82; Walter Steiner and Uta Kühn-Stillmark, Friedrich Justin Bertuch: Ein Leben im klassischen Weimar zwischen Kultur und Kommerz (Köln, 2001), 121–128;
Herder, IX/2, 32–33.
21 Haller, I, 138; Goethe, Werke, 1. Abt., XXXIV/1, 354–355; Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, preface; Forster, Werke, XI, 183 (quotation) and V, 296; Les Mille et une nuits: Contes arabes, ed. Jean-Paul Sermain, trans. Antoine Galland (Paris, 2004), 21–22; Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande (Leipzig, 1747–1774), I, dedication, http://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/vd18/content/title info/11924790. Travel accounts were among the favorite books of eighteenth-century reading societies; see Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, eds. Paul Korshin et al. (Philadelphia, 1976), 162, 171.