Volume 7.1 (Spring 2023)
Natália da Silva Perez and Natacha Klein Käfer. Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making
We tend to associate knowledge with the mind, the intellect, or the brain, but much of what we come to know starts with concrete engagements with the world. Experimentation, rehearsal, repetition, habit formation—all of these are intrinsic to getting to know something, and getting to know it well. Because it often involves trial and error, knowledge development is done more comfortably in private, where the knowledge-maker remains unobserved while learning or developing something new. Even when practices of knowledge-making achieve a stage where they require social engagement, there might still be a concern for maintaining a certain level of privacy. Groups create strategies to confine the spreading of their techniques. Masters and apprentices share their knowledge under strict rules of the trade. Cooks conceal key ingredients from the tasters of their delicacies, and basically every grandparent is the keeper of a secret family recipe. It is often the case that tacit rules serve to control who has permission to acquire certain types of knowledge and who has permission to pass knowledge on to new learners. This special issue seeks to elucidate, through a variety of historical case studies, the many intersections between people’s need for privacy and their practices of knowledge production.
As our starting point for these studies, we understand privacy as being historically contingent. We define it, loosely, as an ability that people might have to “regulate, adjust, or control access to themselves or to their material and immaterial resources,” but our understanding of it does not take for granted any legally defined protection.1 We take this position so that the contributors to this special issue can adapt their analysis of privacy—as “a human phenomenon that is to do with experiences of withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access”2—to different historical and social contexts where practices of knowledge production take place. Through the discussions about privacy contained in this special issue, it will become apparent that privacy’s converse is not simply a diametrically opposed notion of “public,” but rather that there is a spectrum of practices that allow for the regulation of access according to needs and desires that are context-specific. On one end of the spectrum of privacy, we might observe knowledge-makers who need to conceal their activities. On the opposite end, others would rather have their knowledge practices as visible as possible. Between these endpoints in the spectrum, we see a variety of examples of knowledge-making activities that are more or less hidden, more or less accessible, at times moving along the spectrum depending on the stage of development.
Knowledge here is also employed in a broad sense. We have been working with a concept of knowledge, as described by Peter Burke, that encapsulates “information, erudition, science, or wisdom.”3 Yet, as we have noted elsewhere, knowledge also “goes beyond these to include religious beliefs, domestic practices of everyday life, behaviors, and emotions.”4 The case studies in this special issue will discuss these possibilities for knowledge in their entanglement with practices of privacy in order to highlight how privacy, at times, can hinder or help knowledge-makers reach their objectives. As we will see, practices of privacy and of publicity are intimately linked to dynamics of knowledge circulation and transmission.5
Our contributors analyzed historical cases dealing with dynamics of knowledge concealment and disclosure for diverse reasons, including those of personal convictions clashing with authorities (Thea Sumalvico), rehearsal of one’s own self-fashioning (Tilman Richter), ideological convictions (Liam Benison), commercial interest (Cristina Sasse), safety and survival (Sanne de Laat and Dan Harms), and self-improvement (Holly Day). The articles in this special issue focus on the intersection between historical privacy studies and the history of knowledge practices, paying special attention to their entanglement.
But why should we examine these entanglements of privacy and knowledge-making? Recent developments in psychological research suggest that human flourishing happens best when people meet basic psychological needs related to autonomy, relatedness, and competence.6 We argue that privacy emerges—as we observe in the historical cases presented here—as a prerequisite for knowledge-makers and knowledge-users to meet these psychological needs during their practices.
The psychological need for autonomy can perhaps be most easily associated with privacy. Autonomy is the need that people feel to “self-regulate their experiences and actions” but, importantly, it is not equated with utter independence or radical self-reliance.7 Autonomy is key to knowledge production, and it was at the center of how early modern learners navigated their practices, techniques, and knowledge interactions, as shown by many of the contributions in this special issue. Autonomy, understood as the self-endorsement of one’s own behaviors, is fully compatible with people’s need for relatedness, another one of the basic psychological needs.8
Relatedness is understood as the need to feel socially connected and cared for by others, as well as useful to others.9 As Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci succinctly put it, relatedness also encompasses “a sense of being integral to social organizations beyond oneself,” and is deeply linked to people’s ability to feel that they belong to a group and that they contribute to society. As will become evident through some of the cases studied here, sharing the knowledge they produce can bring people a sense of fulfillment, which, as we suggest, is an important way to satisfy the psychological need for relatedness.
Competence, from these psychological needs, is the one most obviously linked to knowledge. Ryan and Deci describe people’s need for competence as a “need to feel effectance and mastery,” that is, a need to feel that they know how to have causal effects in the world around them, that they are capable of manipulating their environment to improve upon it.10 Curiosity is a manifestation of the need for competence and drives many knowledge-related actions. In the context of the present special issue, we want to emphasize Ryan and Deci’s warning that competence can be easily thwarted:
Competence […] wanes in contexts in which challenges are too difficult, negative feedback is pervasive, or feelings of mastery and effectiveness are diminished or undermined by interpersonal factors such as person-focused criticism and social comparisons.11
From this warning, it becomes apparent that access to moments of privacy is indispensable in a person’s development of their competence in a particular activity. In other words, privacy is important if this person is to persevere through the inevitable psychological difficulties that they will encounter as they learn a new skill or develop new knowledge.
Although the notion of psychological needs is recent, it is rooted in experiences that historical agents many times encountered in their processes of knowledge-making. While these three basic psychological needs—competence, relatedness, and autonomy—are considered distinct from one another for the sake of experimental psychological research, they are nevertheless mutually dependent in real life, and their symbiosis is demonstrated in the historical case studies presented here, which engage with contexts of knowledge-making, training, discovering, and learning.
Exploring history in engagement with how psychological needs informed and shaped human experience in the past adds a new dimension to the study of the history of knowledge-making practices. The field of history of emotions has demonstrated how engaging directly with such needs is not without its pitfalls: we need to understand how what we now conceptualize as competence, relatedness, and autonomy was construed in culturally specific historical contexts and communities.12 Similarly to how we understand privacy as a category that can be historicized as sets of strategies of protection that people of the past needed to create or adapt to their circumstances, we can employ these psychological needs as tools for exploring why and how historical agents would create their knowledge in private.
As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, knowledge-makers implement strategies from the spectrum of privacy in order to meet those needs in their individual processes, according to the unique circumstances of their historical, cultural, and societal demands. As we think through the basic psychological needs described above and examine the case studies of this special issue, we notice that the practices of privacy discussed here often sought to support creation, control, and communication of knowledge, which in turn support, respectively, the needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, in their real-world entangled and historical manifestations.
Communication of knowledge relies on practices of privacy precisely so that knowledge can go to the right ends or be engaged within the right contexts. In “How Private Is Religion? Theological Debates on Private and Public Religion as a Background for Woellner’s Edict on Religion in Late Eighteenth-Century Prussia,” Thea Sumalvico examines privacy as a strategy to regulate communication of religious knowledge in eighteenth-century Prussia. As enlightened thought developed, its tenets were gradually incorporated in theological debates, and privacy emerged in these debates as a means for religious tolerance. But as Sumalvico’s discussion shows, the concept of privacy and of private religion was contentious and far from unanimous.
In “The Forging of One’s Self: Inauthentic Signatures and the Privacy of Handwriting,” Tilman Richter provides examples of privacy supporting the creation of knowledge about the self, both as a performative practice of “posing as somebody” and of people’s self-representation as something “connected to their bodily peculiarities, to their behavior, to their cultural origins.” In private, rehearsing a signature brings about individuality in the form of a written representation.
In “Negotiations at the Border of Knowledge: The Paradox of Privacy in Early Modern Utopia,” Liam Benison examines how privacy is represented in utopian thought, paying attention to the paradoxes that arise because of “utopia’s ostensible rejection of privacy and utopia’s status as a private, secluded space.” Benisons shows that utopias portrayed privacy as a “filtered” need, required in order to maintain social cohesion within their idealized, imagined spaces.
Commercialization of knowledge can jeopardize privacy. In the article “‘A Proper Direction to Their Places of Abode’: Street Addressing and Wayfinding in England, ca. 1650–1850,” Cristina Sasse discusses how control of access to physical places can be thwarted by the spread of knowledge about how to arrive at these places. And since this knowledge about street addressing increasingly became a valuable commercial asset, something that today we take for granted seemed to pose a challenge to the privacy of urban dwellers of the early modern period.
Privacy as a support for creation of knowledge is exemplified in the article “‘It’s a Kind of Magic’: Juggling Privacy and Prosecution for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Magical Practitioners,” where Sanne de Laat and Dan Harms discuss “legal and social dangers” that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century magic practitioners needed to face when engaging in their art. The authors analyze the example of scrying, a magical practice where a “magician gains knowledge by means of looking into a reflective surface.” Manuals of magic, legal testimonies, and ritual accounts—historical sources where the practices are described—convey the need for privacy aspired to, but also suggest that it was quite hard to obtain.
Privacy also serves as a stepping stone for the control of knowledge. In the article “‘Memorandums, of No Use to Any but the Owner’: Finding Value in Eighteenth-Century Pocket Memorandum Books,” Holly Day discusses how it was the personal information that memorandum owners wrote in these booklets that made them valuable. Produced and sold by the thousands, the commercial memorandum book was not of significant monetary value in and of itself. Yet, from the rewards offered by owners to recover lost memorandums, we can gauge how important it was for them to protect the information deposited therein.
These contributions demonstrate that privacy in knowledge-making can be found in unexpected sources, revealing the processes of creation, control, and communication of knowledge from the past. It is safe to assume that most of the extant historical sources on knowledge production have gone through some level of polishing. Very few traces are left that bear witness to knowledge in the making—when ideas were still rough around the edges—precisely because people must have been keen on keeping onlookers at bay. Privacy can, therefore, be seen as a crucial tool of knowledge which incorporated the myriad ways people regulated concealment and disclosure.
Thea Sumalvico. How Private Is Religion? Theological Debates on Private and Public Religion as a Background for Woellner’s Edict on Religion in Late Eighteenth-Century Prussia
In 1788, the new king of Prussia Friedrich Wilhelm II published an edict on religion under the auspices of his minister of state, Johann Christoph Woellner. The edict is very often interpreted as the renunciation of the tolerant religious policy of the late Friedrich II, who is generally regarded by historians as a promoter of tolerance and enlightenment. In contrast, I argue that the edict needs to be seen in the context of theological arguments, formulated among others by theologians who understood themselves as enlightened, such as Johann Salomo Semler. They distinguish between a public religion bound to certain dogmas and a private religion, independent from institutionalized religion and leading to increasing religious insight. This distinction is implicitly taken as a basis for Woellner’s edict, where religious attitudes differing from the “mainstream” are permitted, but they are to be kept in the private sphere. To interpret the edict rather in context of so-called enlightenment theology then as part of the counter-enlightenment also challenges our interpretation of the enlightenment as epoch of tolerance and religious freedom.
Tilman Richter. The Forging of One’s Self: Inauthentic Signatures and the Privacy of Handwriting
The article examines the ambiguous relationship between the handwritten signature and privacy. Read as an expression of individuality, the signature serves as a means of (public) representation and documentation; at the same time, its appearance is said to be connected to a person’s character and their specific manners that are developed and acted upon most freely in private. Based on the examples of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s autograph collection and Thomas Mann’s designs for the signatures of two characters from his novel Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, this article explores inauthentic signatures—signatures displaying a name other than the signatory’s—as a practice of performing individuality through writing. It concludes that the relationship between individuality and handwriting is not dependent on notions of authenticity, but instead is established through diverse practices involving (among others) posing and imitation. Thus, privacy not only provides a space for the enactment of “authentic” self-expression, but also for the exploration of personality through playful and imaginative practices.
Liam Benison. Negotiations at the Border of Knowledge. The Paradox of Privacy in Early Modern Utopia
Utopianism has had a contradictory relationship with privacy since Thomas More envisioned a society without privacy and private property in Utopia (1516). Paradoxically, utopia is a private place; its isolation protects it from outside corruption. This contradiction invites an investigation of early modern conceptions of privacy in utopian literature. Given utopias’ aspiration to social harmony, what might it suggest about ideas to resolve the tensions involved in social negotiations over the boundaries of private spaces, and which individuals and knowledge should be allowed entry or be excluded? This article explores this question in two early modern utopias, The History of the Sevarambians by Denis Vairasse (1675–79) and Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes by Hendrik Smeeks (1708). I examine the meaning of privacy in these utopias by drawing on Philipp Sarasin’s approach to the history of knowledge. I explore how utopian social knowledge is constructed, how it circulated, and the material conditions of its framing in printed texts. I conclude that Vairasse and Smeeks understood the creation of knowledge from a Baconian perspective as requiring a filtered privacy that must be negotiated, defined, and protected to maintain social harmony.
Cristina Sasse. “A Proper Direction to Their Places of Abode”: Street Addressing and Wayfinding in England, ca. 1650–1850
Finding one’s way around a town, the house of a friend, or a specific shop, are everyday practices and challenges that involve the application of much implicit knowledge—knowledge of spatial patterns, routes, and directions, for instance, which is often acquired performatively and unconsciously. In eighteenth-century England, rapid urbanization, increased mobility, and intensified commercial exchange aggravated such challenges. This gave rise to various media designed to assist orientation and make local knowledge more readily available to wider audiences, for example, in maps, directories, and guidebooks.
One type of information particularly affected by this development was the street address of individual residents and businesses. While up until the beginning of the eighteenth century such directions, as used in advertisements and on letters, tended to be highly specific, detailed, and changeable, over the course of a few decades, they became more standardized and concise. This was closely connected to an increasing tendency to treat addresses as stable and clear-cut pieces of information that could be passed on, published, and retrieved easily. Originally fluid, tacit knowledge was thus transformed into standardized, explicit information, fixed on calling cards and in directories. However, these forms of publication not only served to facilitate social and economic interactions, but they also touched upon sensitive issues of privacy: being easy to find was not necessarily desirable and, in fact, deemed rather risky by some, who consequently tried to keep information about their place of residence or work private.
This paper sketches the development of styles and practices of street addressing in England between 1650 and 1850, drawing upon rich source material such as letters, directories, advertisements, and Post Office papers as well as contemporary novels. It serves as a case study of the complex relations between tacit and explicit, private and public knowledge.
Sanne de Laat and Dan Harms. “It’s a Kind of Magic”: Juggling Privacy and Prosecution for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Magical Practitioners
Practitioners of ritual magic in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain faced both legal and social dangers, yet continued to engage in their activities with the assistance and support of other members of society. Doing so necessitated the acquisition and maintenance of privacy, even if it must often be breached to ensure success. After a discussion of ritual magicians’ privacy in both indoor and outdoor settings, this chapter examines scrying, a subtype of ritual magic in which the magician gains knowledge by means of looking into a reflective surface. Both manuals of magic and popular and legal accounts of such rituals display how magicians aspired to privacy under challenging social and spatial conditions, with varying degrees of success.
Holly Day. “Memorandums, of No Use to Any but the Owner”: Finding Value in Eighteenth-Century Pocket Memorandum Books
In 1748, the London publisher Robert Dodsley pioneered a new contribution to the eighteenth-century print market: the pocket memorandum book. A forerunner of the modern-day Filofax, the pocket memorandum book was an annual publication that bundled together a variety of useful and entertaining printed information along with preformatted memorandums and accounts pages, left blank for their owner to fill in. The immense popularity of this genre in eighteenth-century Britain has not been reflected in modern scholarship on life-writing and autobiographical practice. This article explores the early evolution of the genre, and shows how individuals could use memorandum books to build up a storehouse of personal knowledge. In doing so, it recovers the contemporary value placed on the pocket memorandum book as indexical to a person’s life and, by extension, to their character.