Social History of Knowledge

Asa Briggs is Chancellor of the Open University and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.Peter Burke is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

• List of Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgements.1. Sociologies and Histories of Knowledge: an Introduction.2. Professing Knowledge: the European Clerisy.3. Establishing Knowledge: Institutions Old and New.4. Locating Knowledge: Centres and Peripheries.Classifying Knowledge: Curricula, Libraries and Encyclopaedias.6. Controlling Knowledge: Churches and States.7. Selling Knowledge: the Market and the Press.8. Acquiring Knowledge: The Reader's Share.9. Trusting and Distrusting Knowledge; a Coda.Select Bibliography.Index.

'In Peter Burke's scholarly hands the notion of a social history of knowledge sheds its philosophical provocation and becomes judicious, prudent and historically rich. A beautifully written and accessible exercise in historical synthesis.' Steven Shapin, author of "A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England" (1994) and Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego'Peter Burke is an exceptional historian: a polyglot, at home in a dozen languages; an intellectual, who is well versed in theoretical developments adjacent to history; a superb expositor, with the capacity to distil his findings in unpretentious and limpidly accessible prose; and an author of unflagging vitality, whose prolific studies in the cultural history of early modern Europe and in modern historiography constitute a formidable oeuvre ... He has succeeded in producing a balanced, judicious and highly stimulating work of synthesis. His book will be an indispensable starting point for years to come.' Keith Thomas, History Today 'Burke has made a significant contribution to cultural history ... [He] shows how knowledge was a form of exchange and how it became what we would recognize it as today. Burke's achievement in A Social History of Knowledge is to remind us that people in the past did not view knowledge in the same way as we do today.' History