Ways of knowing in early modern Germany

Gerhild Scholz Williams here introduces the modern reader to the writings of Johannes Praetorius, an educated and productive German polymath of the seventeenth century. In his work we see the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies.