Entangling Knowledge and Ignorance

Vera KEller

History and Theory 64, no. 3 (2025)

Review essay on Alain Corbin, Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, translated by Susan Pickford (Polity, 2021)

This review essays situates Alain Corbin's Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries within current discussions of knowledge and ignorance related to intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge. These varying approaches have drawn the borderland between knowledge and ignorance divergently. After a brief critique of the Corbin's positivist approach in Terra Incognita, I sketch some well-known ground in the history of science over the past two generations. I then point to how recent discussions of the relationships between intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge have tended to sidestep that history. I conclude by suggesting how indigenous studies and Corbin's own previous work might serve to better entangle knowledge and ignorance in ways that might draw on the strengths of all three fields.