Modes of tradition, Modes of inspection, Modes of application: Assigning meaning to artefacts of divination in Europe from the 17th to the early 20th century

在个人和集体的人类经验中，预言未来的愿望是一种持续存在的现象。几千年来，为了应对未来事件的偶然性，人类要么解释公认的自然信号，要么解释人工信号。尽管占卜的实践在很长一段时间内都很重要，也很流行，但人们可以观察到，在17世纪中叶之后，占卜逐渐失去了它的重要性，尤其是它作为一种既定的知识生产方式在整个欧洲的合法性。这种分离或隔阂表现在占卜的人工制品不再被用于它们最初的目的。相反，它们成为博物馆收藏的对象，因此被嵌入到全新的环境中。该项目的主要焦点是对占卜物品的（重新）解释的历史，以及为博物馆收集这些物品的行为。该项目由两个子项目组成，它们按时间顺序相互构建。涵盖早期现代时期的子项目侧重于17世纪至19世纪初欧洲宫廷（德累斯顿，wolfenb<e:1>泰尔，慕尼黑）的收藏。这些藏品的特点是，在近代早期占卜实践的鼎盛时期，相关的人工制品已经被系统地编纂。然而，随着洞察力的衰退，这些文物并没有从收藏中移除。相反，它们仍然是欧洲宫廷珍品陈列柜代表性项目的组成部分。因此，这些收藏提供了一种超越启蒙运动支持者经常争论的辩论的视角：重点在于早期现代晚期对占卜态度的过渡现象，以及同时代人如何处理其先前重要性的下降。第二个子项目位于德国国家博物馆（纽伦堡），随后探索了为制度化博物馆收集书面和材料占卜资料的开始，特别是19世纪和20世纪初。由于当时的科学理论用“迷信”这个词来对抗历史预言的来源，子项目主要关注以下问题：在现代博物馆的早期，对这些来源的策展态度是厌恶还是肯定？这种态度是如何在这个系列的构成和展示中表达出来的？参观者对博物馆展示的占卜实践的人工制品有什么反应？通过其跨时代的方法，拟议的项目将确定王公贵族和资产阶级的收藏在多大程度上促进了占卜实践的历史化，以及它们作为荒谬和可疑的知识生产模式的贬值。

The desire to foretell the future is a constant phenomenon in the individual and collective human experience. For thousands of years, humans interpreted either reputed natural or artificial signs in order to cope with the contingency of future events. Although practices of divination were important and prevalent for a long time, one can observe that after the middle of the 17th century, divination increasingly lost its significance and especially its legitimacy as an established mode of production of knowledge across Europe.This dissociation or estrangement is demonstrated by the fact that divinatory artefacts were no longer used for their original purpose. Instead, they became objects of museum collections and were thus embedded into entirely new contexts. The main focus of the project is the history of the (re)interpretation of divinatory objects as well as the act of collecting these objects for museums.The project comprises of two subprojects that build on each other chronologically. The subproject that covers the Early Modern Period focuses on collections at European courts (Dresden, Wolfenbüttel, Munich) between the 17th and the early 19th century. What characterizes these collections is that the relevant artefacts were already compiled systematically during the heyday of divinatory practice in the early modern era. With the decline of clairvoyance, however, these artefacts were precisely not removed from the collections. Rather, they remained an element of the representative programme of the cabinets of curiosities at European courts. Thus, the collections offer a look beyond the frequently polemicized debates of the proponents of the Enlightenment: the focus lies on transitional phenomena regarding the attitude towards divination in the late Early Modern Period as well as how the decline of its former significance was processed by contemporaries. Located at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg), the second subproject subsequently explores the beginnings of collecting written and material divinatory sources for institutionalized museums, particularly of the 19th and early 20th century. As scientific theory at the time scorned sources of historic prognostication with the fighting word superstition, the subproject focuses on the following questions: Which aversive or affirmative curatorial attitude was displayed towards such sources in the early period of modern museums? How was this attitude expressed in the composition of the collection and its presentation? What were the visitors reactions to the artefacts of divinatory practice that museums showcased?With its crossepochal approach, the proposed project will determine to what extent princely and bourgeois collections contributed to the historization of divinatory practices and their devaluation as ridiculous and dubious modes of the production of knowledge.