Threatened Knowledge: Practices of Knowing and Ignoring from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Provides an accessible summary of where the field is at, perfect for researchers and upper level students of the history of knowledge. At the end of each chapter are suggestions for related and complementary chapters within the book, to ensure students can see how the examples related to one another and the comparison’s made in the volume.

The volume offers a broad inclusive view of knowledge practices and all the chapters offer a praxeological approach to their sources. Threatened Knowledge enables researchers and students to understand how actors in different historical periods and regions of the world describe the order in which they lived, how they defined an order worth preserving, and when a specific order lost its function the role the actors’ self-conception took.

The chapters cover a range of examples from Carolingian Europe and the British Commonwealth to single cities like Cairo or even share brokers’ halls in America around 1900. Providing students with a useful range of example to draw upon but also the tools to conduct their own research into other centres of knowledge.