Abstract

The Polyhistorian Space of Knowledge Re‐Organized: Johann Christoph Stockhausen's Critischer Entwurf einer auserlesenen Bibliothek für den Liebhaber der Philosophie und schönen Wissenschaften (1752). The example of Johann Christoph Stockhausen's Critischer Entwurf einer auserlesenen Bibliothek für den Liebhaber der Philosophie und schönen Wissenschaften shows how the space of learned knowledge – in the literal and metaphorical sense – is reorganized around the middle of the 18th century. The traditional polyhistorian order of knowledge gradually integrates elements of enlightened scholarship without completely giving up the old ideals. Considering the background of this process, Stockhausen is anything but a polyhistorian latecomer; on the contrary he has to be seen as a pragmatic theoretician trying to render learned knowledge sustainable in a changing world of scholarship. His outline of an ideal library, compared with its forerunners, is distinguished by a more pragmatic perspective and a virtualized concept of the library. He still operates with traditional topoi, but, at the same time, uses an innovative guiding semantics, within which the catchword ‘critical’ plays a central role.