Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit

Against the backdrop of contemporary debates over the creative potential and embodiment of cognitive processes, imagination, a concept that traditionally mediates between perception and thought, has acquired particular topicality. But whereas the positive role of imagination as productive faculty and agency of knowledge has often been underlined in previous theoretical approaches, concomitant practical and ethical problems, traceable in the longue durée of the critique of imagination, remain largely unilluminated. The present volume addresses these problems and explores the reciprocal relationship between the productive excesses and disciplining exercises of the imagination from the Middle Ages to the present day across art history and theory, history of ideas, literary studies and philosophy. This collection of essays demonstrates that the demarcation between the legitimately imaginable and the unimaginable is not confined to private cognitive and meditative practice. Rather, it encompasses rituals, rhetorical techniques, multiple forms of knowledge, artistic production and reception, and, not least, configurations of public and political space.

Contents

Hana Gründler and Jakob Moser: Practices of Imagination. An Introduction 

Ravinder S. Binning: Desert Phantasia. Practises of Imagination in Early Egyptian Monasticism

Katharine Stahlbuhk: »[A]d modum Sompnii Scipionis«. Il sogno raccontato come strumento letterario di divulgazione politico-religiosa nel Quattrocento

Fausto Fraisopi: Imagination as Anthropological Topic. Imaginary Worlds and Utopian Languages from Renaissance to Descartes (and Leibniz)

Giulia Baldelli: Jacob Böhmes Text-Produktion als imaginative Schreib- und Lektürepraxis 

Elisabeth Flucher: Eingebildete Krankheit – Krankheit der Einbildungskraft. Zur Diskursgeschichte der Hypochondrie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert

Giovanna Targia: Das Spiel der Einbildungskraft bei Edgar Wind 

Hana Gründler: Politics of Imagination? ›Leonardo‹ in Czech Art and Literature after 1945 

Christoph Paret: Erhebende Einbildungskraft. Jacques Rancière über die deterritorialisierende Wirkung der Landschaft als Bild