Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725

Vera Keller (Ph.D., Princeton University, New Jersey) is an Assistant Professor of History at Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including, most recently, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography and the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

• 1. Collecting the future in the early modern past; Part I. Origins: 2. Knowledge in ruins; 3. A charlatan's promise; Part II. Inventing the Wish List: 4. Jakob Bornitz and the joy of things; 5. Francis Bacon's new world of sciences; 6. Things fall apart: desiderata in the Hartlib circle; 7. Rebelling against useful knowledge; Part III. Institutionalizing Desire: 8. Restoring societies: the Orphean charms of science; 9. What men want: the private and public interests of the Royal Society; 10. Enemy camps: desiderata and priority disputes; 11. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the hubris of the wish list; 12. Georg Hieronymus Welsch's fiction of consensus; 13. Wish lists enter the Academy: a new intellectual economy; 14. No final frontiers.

'Vera Keller develops a strikingly new perspective on early modern science by focusing on the genre of the wish list and its spread in English- and German-speaking contexts across the long seventeenth century. Ambitious goals that promised the fulfilment of political and economic desires amid an awareness of the precariousness of knowledge motivated a host of fascinating characters, from charlatans to major philosophers. In her richly researched analysis Keller shows how the early modern pursuit of desiderata fostered an ideal of sustained collaborative research that has endured to this day.' Ann Blair, Harvard University, Massachusetts