On 11‒13 October 2018, the conference “The querelle that wasn’t? ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in the intellectual culture of Habsburg Europe, 1700‒1750,” organized by the FWF project “Benedictines, State Reform and the Church in Austria, 1720‒40,” will take place in the “Aula” auditorium at the campus of the University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna.
The Habsburg monarchy was a globally networked world power in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nevertheless, hardly any of its knowledge culture and world of ideas is present in the collective memory today. This is not least due to the fact that Western Europe is still considered the benchmark for the history of ideas and the independent developments of Central Europe have been ignored for decades. A central aspect of intellectual culture in the 18th century was the handling of tradition in all areas of knowledge. An international conference in Vienna, organized by the FWF project “Benedictines, State Reform and the Church in Austria, 1720‒40” is dedicated to the discourse of “old” and “new” in the sciences of Central Europe during the 18th century. Case studies from theology, natural sciences, philosophy, art history, philology, law, and history will paint a differentiated picture of the various possibilities of updating the past—or distancing oneself from it.
Pez Workshop 