History of Curiosity

Justin Stagl, born 1941, in Klagenfurt, Austria, presently holds the Chair in Sociology of Culture at the University of Saltzburg, Austria. Main fields of interest: theory and history of the social sciences, sociology of culture.

• The methodizing of travel in the 16th century - a tale of three cities; rerum memoria - early modern enquiries and documentation centres; imagines mundi - allegories of the continents in the Baroque and the Enlightenment; the man who called himself George Psalmanaazar or the problems of the authenticity of ethnographic description; Josephinism and social research - the patriotic traveller of Count Leopold Berchtold; August Ludwig Schlozer and the study of mankind according to peoples; from the autonomous to the heteronomous traveller - Volney's reform of travel instruction and the French Revolution.

'...Stagl's explorations of late eighteenth-century debates over the nature of World History are also enlightening, as they reveal the origins of Volkskunde and ethnologie - categories that were to dominate travel and scholarship for the next two centries to the present.''This strikingly original, painstakingly researched...book exhibits all the virtues and a few of the weaknesses of long-sustained maverick devotion. Though not exclusively focused upon travel, it will remain a pillar of scholarship in travel history...For anyone interested in the history of travel cultures this book - with its rich references to primary manuscript sources and German historical scholarship not available in English - will prove indispensable.'