Old New Unknown
Charlotta Forss Charlotta Forss The Old, the New and the Unknown This thesis investigates early modern ways of looking at the world through an analysis of what the continents meant in three settings of knowledge making in seventeenth-century Sweden. Combining text, maps and images, the thesis anal- yses the meaning of the continents in, frst, early modern scholarly ‘geography’, second, accounts of journeys to the Ottoman Empire and, third, accounts of journeys to the colony New Sweden. The investigation explores how an under- standing of conceptual categories such as the continents was intertwined with processes of making and presenting knowledge. In this, the study combines ap- proaches from conceptual history with research on knowledge construction and circulation in the early modern world. The thesis shows how geographical frameworks shifted between settings. There was variation in what the continents meant and what roles they could fll. Rather THE than attribute this fexibility to random variation or mistakes, this thesis inter- The Old, the New and Unknown OLD prets fexibility as an integral part of how the world was conceptualized. Reli- gious themes, ideas about societal unities, defnitions of old, new and unknown knowledge, as well as practical considerations, were factors that in different way shaped what the continents meant. THE NEW A scheme of continents – usually consisting of the entities ‘Africa,’ ‘America,’ ‘Asia,’ ‘Europe’ and the polar regions – is a part of descriptions about what the world looks like today. In such descriptions, the continents are often treated as existing outside of history. However, like other concepts, the meaning and sig- nifcance of these concepts have changed drastically over time and between con- AND THE texts.
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