Skepsis, Providenz, Polyhistorie

Jakob Friedrich Reimmann stands between Baroque and Enlightenment. He is one of the major representatives of early 18th century historia litteraria, that forgotten discipline which set out to be a history of education, science and the book, and which Reimmann himself applied systematically to a whole range of subjects and cultures. His oeuvre may be seen as typifying the tensions emerging between an inherited faith in providentially ordained history and a new skeptical/hypothetical scientific culture.