Abstract
European expansion provided Europe with the goods that drove the emergence of an early consumer society. Although the German lands did not play a significant role in the colonial project, German merchants were prominent in major Atlanic ports and successfully paricipated in colonial ventures. They also traded colonial goods and exotic substances to the German-speaking regions. The project invesigates the import, dissemination, and production of knowledge about exotic substances, which were consumed primarily as therapeutic products, and contributes to the study of early modern consumer culture in Germany in the epistemic transition from the early modern period to modernity. So far, we know very litle about the distribution and consumption of these goods, although the arrival of exotic remedies in Europe contributed significantly to the scientification of medicine. This replaced the humoral-pathological understanding of disease with a more scientific view of the body, which was increasingly able to identify diseases and find new ways to treat them. It examines trade statistics to draw conclusions about the extent and speed of the increase in imports of exotic remedies. The project analyses the production of knowledge about remedies in a lively commercial print culture that developed between late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, became increasingly differentiated and appealed to different reader groups. These books contain, among much other information, advice on how the exotic remedies can be used in medical practice and consumed by the buyers. Finally, consumption is also examined based on medical prescriptions and recipe books, which makes it possible to understand, at least for selected towns in the German hinterland, how exotic remedies were integrated into medical practice during this period. All sources are made available digitally by means of AI-powered OCR and HTR transcription and examined with innovative methods of the Digital Humanities.
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