Draft:Martin Mulsow

Mulsow studied philosophy, German literature, and history in Tübingen, Berlin, and Munich. In 1991 he received his doctorate in philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the supervision of Dieter Henrich, and he completed his habilitation there in 2000. From 2001 to 2005 he led a subproject within Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 573 at the University of Munich, and from 2005 to 2009 (together with Winfried Schulze and Ulrich Beck) he led a subproject within SFB 536.

From 2005 to 2008 he held a professorship in history (full professor) at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA). Since 2008, Mulsow has been Professor of Knowledge Cultures of Early Modern Europe at the University of Erfurt and Director of the Gotha Research Centre.

In 2002/03 he was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; in spring 2005 a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris; in 2007/08 a Member of the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton; in 2012/13 a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; in 2016 a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; in 2017 a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam; and in 2024/25 a Fellow of the New Institute in Hamburg.

Together with Jörg Rüpke, Mulsow directed the Kolleg-Forschergruppe “Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective” (2013–2027). He has also been a member of the steering committee of the Wolfenbüttel Working Group for Baroque Research, served as Vice President of the German Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2010–2014), and since 2024 has been Chair of the Early Modern Working Group within the Association of German Historians (VHD).

Mulsow is editor or co-editor of several book series (Frühe Neuzeit at De Gruyter; Sozinianismus und Heterodoxie at Franz Steiner Verlag; Humanistische Bibliothek at Fink Verlag/Brill; Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit at Franz Steiner Verlag), and for many years was a member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte as well as an advisory board member of the Verlag der Weltreligionen.

For his work he has received numerous awards, including in 1999 the “Premio internazionale di storia della filosofia Luigi de Franco” for the best book in Renaissance philosophy; in 2004 the Karl Jaspers Prize of the University of Oldenburg; and in 2005 and 2007 the “Selma V. Forkosch Prize,” awarded annually for the best article in the Journal of the History of Ideas. In 2011 he received the Academy Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (endowed with €30,000). In 2013 he was awarded the Thuringian Research Prize, and in 2014 the Anna Krüger Prize of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for an outstanding scholarly work written in clear and accessible language. For 2019–2021 Mulsow received the Opus Magnum Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation.

Since 2012 he has been a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities; since 2016 a full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities; and since 2023 a corresponding member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Mulsow pursues an interdisciplinary approach to early modern studies that situates knowledge history between intellectual history, historical anthropology, and cultural history. His research covers Renaissance philosophy; practices of early modern scholarship (philology, numismatics, Oriental studies, antiquarianism); history of science (alchemy, medicine, natural philosophy); and heterodox and suppressed currents (Socinianism, Judaism, radical Pietism, libertinage érudit, clandestine Radical Enlightenment). He also works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court culture and global intellectual history. In addition, he is an expert on the German early Enlightenment and on secret societies of the German Enlightenment, especially the Illuminati. He has also written theoretical works on historiographical methodology and the process of modernity, and more recently has been exploring the consequences of the climate crisis for intellectual history.

Mulsow’s adaptation of Dieter Henrich’s method of constellation research—originally developed for Classical German Philosophy—into a general method of intellectual and knowledge history has attracted considerable attention. He defines a constellation as a “dense nexus of persons, ideas, theories, problems, and documents that mutually interact in such a way that only the analysis of this nexus, rather than its isolated components, makes possible an understanding of the philosophical achievement and development of the persons, ideas, and theories involved.” He emphasizes in particular the differing plot structures of constellations, the inclusion of orality, and the problem structure of specific intellectual spaces, which can also be analyzed with regard to their unrealized potentials. He further discusses both the proximity to and the differences from social network analysis and microhistory.

In Gotha, Mulsow for many years directed a graduate school devoted to “underground research.” By this he means the interdisciplinary study of persons and groups who conducted their activities secretly and covertly—not only freethinkers and religious sectarians, but also spies, secret diplomats, clandestine vagrants and criminals, alchemists or homosexuals, members of secret societies or economic fraudsters. These groups are usually studied separately; underground research, by contrast, investigates their overlaps and forms of socialization, as well as shared spaces and tactics.

In 2012 Mulsow introduced the concept of “precarious knowledge” into scholarly discussion. The term emphasizes the loss dimension of knowledge and refers to the endangerment of bodies of knowledge—either through the loss of their material carriers or through publication bans and the marginalization of those who developed such knowledge but were unable to disseminate it, so that it risked perishing with them. Mulsow is particularly interested in the tactics employed to counter such dangers, such as the clandestine manuscript circulation of texts or the hiding of messages in jokes or footnotes. With this new focus he seeks, not least, to transform research on the Radical Enlightenment, which has so far concentrated on contents and modes of diffusion rather than on questions of habitus, social role, and tactics. The approach has since been fruitfully adopted by medievalists, literary scholars (“precarious literatures”), and theologians.

In an essay from 2014, Mulsow outlined an understanding of the diffusion of ideas that is oriented toward the biological model of the food web. Such a holistic model appears particularly necessary for clandestine, forbidden ideas. For it is not sufficient to investigate only the relationships among the “large” actors (like larger animals; active freethinkers), but also their interaction with smaller and seemingly passive or even resistant actors (parasites, bacteria in the forest soil; collectors, orthodox theologians); indeed, even objects and material culture must be taken into account: a collector hoards clandestine manuscripts, a theologian reads them in order to refute them; and only in this way are the ideas (and their material carriers) subsequently transported further to new radical thinkers who take them up.

“Global Intellectual History” is an expansion of traditional intellectual history, promoted in the Anglophone world since around 2013, in which the contents and perspectives of non-European cultures also play a central role, especially intellectual diffusions, connections, and entanglements between different cultural spheres. In 2022 Mulsow published the first major monograph in German on the subject, offering numerous methodological proposals, including the concept of “overreach” as a misguided reference under risky conditions of attribution, based on false or insufficient information (“referential supply chains”), and the concept of the “double helix” of transmission history (from the real origin of an idea, text, or designation through various stages to the present) on the one hand, and memory history (the culturally constructed retrospective attribution by recipients at each stage of transmission to what they believe to be the origin or author) on the other.

More recently, Mulsow has been developing a “Deep Intellectual History,” understood as the analysis of very early intellectual imprints reaching back into the earliest phases of human civilizations, whose traces can be followed in later styles of thought. This concerns fundamental concepts and practices such as justice or truth. The projected discipline combines historical linguistics, archaeogenetics, archaeology, and early history (in the sense of Daniel Lord Smail’s “Deep History”) with intellectual history and global history.